Near miss.

[Jon Lad]

A tree surgeon based not too far away from me bought a new chipper some years back. I'm not going to say which make of chipper or the dealer who supplied it. They took the machine to a job, first time out. Started it up and began chipping. After it had been running a while, there was this massive bang and one of the knives came through the top of the housing.

They turned the machine off and were checking out the damage, when this builder who had been working on some scaffolding next door came round carrying the chipper blade. He said he had heard it come past him on the scaffold and then embed itself in the lawn of next door's garden, sticking up out of the ground. The woman who lived next door was gardening in the back garden at the time, but wasn't aware of what had gone on.

Has anyone else heard of anything similar happening?

[Paul Barton]

Yep. Mate of mine had a knife come off and fly out of the housing and in to a woodland. He never found it.

 

Very scary!

[Frankie Lawrence]

thats madness very near miss bysounds of it.

[Brushcutter]

Yea some friends of mine lost a knife from their chipper. Came out the housing and dissapeared never to be found again.

[Matt Butler]

we had a Premier which some idiot put a scaffold bar through, the blades and the bar shreeded up and came out of the spout like bomb shrapnel

[skyhuck]

we had a Premier which some idiot put a scaffold bar through, the blades and the bar shreeded up and came out of the spout like bomb shrapnel

 

But at least with a Premier (schiesling) the blade will not come through the housing, so it no where near as dangerous.

 

IMO all chipper housings should be strong enough to stop a failed blade.

[Jewillo]

I had this happen to me many years ago with a bandit 250. Blade came off and through the housing then bedded itself in a nearby tree we couldnt remove the blade from the tree ! Probably still there to this day.

[Tree Man Tom]

Yep, ive heard of blades failing. Which is why it makes me cringe when i see people people shoveling chip infront the spout whilst the chippers running.

 

Although i guess in most of these cases its coming through the housing, but if it was to come out of the spout and it was to hit the person shoveling chip they would sure know about it!

[treequip]

In my Local Authority days our employer didn’t deem us competent to change the chipper blades, their fitters had to do that.

 

I collected the chipper from the workshops, took it to a jobsite and turned the key to start chipping. It made a “clunk” and wouldn’t turn. We found an allen key under the blade stopping the flywheel from turning.

 

Turns out this was a good thing since all three 10” blades were only finger tight.

Now that would have been “murder death kill”

[Johny Walker]

my jensen thru a blade some yrs bk put a few dents in housing ,found the bits in the pile of chip ,not good