Dear Chipsters,
Having a sawmill I was able to saw 4/4 boards or slabs then sticker them. After drying they chipped well and made fairly consistent chips, I didn't see a need to screen them. A nice amount of the fines would blow away with the wind so some kind of air separator (cyclone) might be just the ticket with dry material. The down side is that it may take more energy to chip dry wood and it did seem to be noisier. The sawmill is kind of an extra step but the logs have to be broken down some how unless you have a whole tree chipper but then you end up with wet chips and bark crap in your chips. Difficult to make much production chipping branches. The up side is that your stacks store/dry well outside and are easy to handle with a fork lift. This seemed to produce a consistent chip with less fines (plus wind). You might be able to adjust the size of the chip by sawing different size slabs. Having sharp blades seemed to reduce fines. Also, keep an eye on blade angle. Personally I don't care much for chippers. The affordable ones are on the junkie side, the high performance ones are dangerous and expensive and of course they all need maintained well. People have been sucked into them, now you see Fred and now you don't. The whole tree scale, with knuckle boom loader, would be the safest and the specific cost might be the cheapest. Chips ahoy, Jeff _______________________________________________ Gasification mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/gasification_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site: http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/
