Chipping yarns

摘要

Three woodchipper users with very different needs explain why they feel their kit leaves others standing. Andrew Jenkins is passionate about trees and climbing. His CV includes the ascent of Mount Kenya, 100m-high trees in Canada and the tallest tree in Britain. The past four years have seen him managing his own urban and rural tree surgery company, Frontier Forestry, based in Edinburgh. In Cambridge, Dave Franklin is in charge of the team responsible for the upkeep of the university's botanic gardens. The maintenance of the gardens is very intensive and demanding. Franklin is always looking for ways to improve efficiency. And in Warwickshire, contractor Paul Mason undertakes tree surgery work for local authorities and private individuals and alsoground clearance work. His firm, PJS, of Droitwich Spa, also sells mulch and woodchips. Three different people with three different jobs, but they all use woodchippers in the course of their work. And each has different reasons for selecting the modelsthey rely on. With a great deal of clean timber requiring disposal after tree surgery operations, Jenkins needs powerful chippers with a capacity to suit. His company uses 23cm- and 31cm-capacity Bandit brush chippers. The Bandits are Jenkins' preferredmachine because of their toughness. "They are bomb-proof, I wouldn't use any other chipper," he says. "They are good, heavy, American-built chippers - the sort of machine you can overload, really push and they still do the work."