Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Summary: 1. There's a decent chance your machine will arrive with some shipping damage, but Great Circle will make it right for you. 2. The chipper runs great. 3. I can't imagine how anyone could make do with a 2" or 2.5" chipper rather than this 3" chipper. Now, for the details. I'm a lawyer, so I don't spend a lot of time around heavy machinery. (Just imagine this review coming from Oliver Wendell Douglas of "Green Acres" fame, and you won't be far off.) As a result, maybe this review will be too elementary for many buyers, but presumably there are some who will benefit, so here goes. I don't have a lot of land, but I needed the chipper for small trees that spring up in the woods around our lawn and need to be thinned out from time to time, and for the limbs of larger trees that fall over the winter and need to be cleaned up in the spring. I did a lot of cleanup this season, and I do use a lot of wood chips to maintain paths through the woods, so I decided to get a chipper instead of just letting the branches decay. First, let's get the worst part behind us. As some other reviewers have noted, Great Circle is having big shipping problems--units arriving with the packing crates broken and the machines damaged. That's how mine arrived. The customer service people said they're fighting with UPS and FedEx about it, but to me it looks like the fault is all with Great Circle. Exhibit A: I had only seen the damage to the very top of the unit when I called customer service, because I didn't want to open the rest if I was going to send it back. The customer service agent persuaded me to accept a discount off the purchase price and a commitment to replace the damaged parts I hadn't seen yet, and--this part is key--she accurately predicted which parts I would find damaged when I opened the rest of the crate. I'm just a lawyer, but to me, if the same parts are breaking in shipment after shipment, that's on the people who are doing the packing, not the delivery companies. But the good news is that the customer service people did very quickly replace all the damaged parts, and it was not difficult to replace them. Even a lawyer can do it! I would even say that the need to replace the air filter got me looking at the engine a lot more closely than I otherwise would have, and that's probably a good thing. In any event, you should probably expect to spend half an hour putting this thing together if it arrives in perfect condition, but if it arrives in the condition mine was in you might need two or three different 30-minute sessions as the replacement parts arrive. So, when you call customer service to report the damaged shipment, just ask yourself what an extra hour of your time is worth. Unless your hours are much more valuable than mine, they'll probably make you a pretty attractive offer. Now for the chipping. When I fired up the chipper and started chipping, I was really impressed with how well it did and really surprised at how much it reduced the volume of material. I had wondered whether it would really be able to take a branch three inches in diameter, but that was actually the thing it did best. Feed a long straight branch with a diameter of 2-3" into the chute, and you'll have great wood chips fast. If you're wondering how much gas it uses, I filled the 2.8 liter gas tank pretty full, but not to overflowing or anything, and I got three pretty solid hours of operation out of the chipper before I ran out. (I wish it were as easy to fill the crankcase with oil as it is to fill the gas tank. I used the long funnel that came with the machine, and ended up with quite a bit of oil on the ground.) Now here's the biggest surprise to me, even if it's obvious to some of you: It's not really the thickness of the branches that matter, it's the thickness you can squeeze them down to. That's not very clear, so let me explain. There is a foot-long steel tube through which you feed all the branches, and that tube is only 3" in diameter. Obviously, that rules out anything thicker than 3". But you might have a lot of branches that are only 1" in diameter but still won't fit through that tube. Why not? Well, maybe they have a bend in them that prevents them from squeezing through a foot-long tube even though they could easily pass through a 3" ring. Or maybe they fork off at angles that can't be compressed down to 3", or the spring back with such force that it's hard to push them through a foot-long tube. And relatedly, the hardest part of the chipping process with many branches is not the thickest part of the wood, but the very end where the leaves are--because if you think about squeezing all those leaves down to a circle with a three-inch diameter, it doesn't take all that many leaves to make that difficult, particularly if the leaves are still green. I got better at this over time, but the key point is this: If you're trying to decide between, say, a 2" model and a 3" model, go big. It's not really about where you stop using your chainsaw and start using your chipper; it's really about how much work you have to do with your loppers to pare the branches down for chipping. I got better at squeezing them down as I went along, and I don't want to give the impression that it's one branch at a time or anything. If I had it to do all over again, I would definitely buy this 3" model rather than paying double or more for one with a 5" diameter. But geez, I definitely would not want anything smaller than this; there just wouldn't be any point. I have not tried to shred or mulch leaves, and I have not used the vacuum attachment yet, but my primary interest was always the chipping and I am very satisfied with the way this machine chips.