Commercial Woodchippers have nearly as many variations of infeed designs as there are manufacturers, but mostly they come back to 3 X main styles – a single top-mounted horizontal feed wheel, dual horizontal (1 X fixed bottom and flexible top) feed wheels, and a combination of feed wheels (either single or double) and a length of infeed chain or slats on the floor to assist with feeding timber into the cutter drum (or disk). Some large whole-tree chippers also have 2 X fixed vertical feed wheels mounted before the main feed wheels to assist with feeding large branches and difficult material into the tapered infeed hopper.
With the single horizontal feed wheel design, this is typically seen on smaller chippers up to the 12” capacity size and has a major benefit in that the infeed floor is one solid fixed piece, leaving nowhere for any small debris to fall through and make a mess underneath the chipper.
Dual horizontal feed wheels have long been the proven recipe for producing a very strong feeding action into hand-fed chippers and these have proven themselves on bigger Chippers up to the larger 22” sized machines etc. Dual horizontal feed wheels are mostly mounted directly above each other but some manufacturers have mounted them in an offset configuration (the fixed lower wheel in front of the upper wheel) for added feeding power. Also of note is that most manufacturers tend to use the same sized wheels for both top & bottom wheels, whereas others like Piranha use a larger top wheel compared to the smaller sized bottom feed wheel to assist the top feed wheel to climb up and on top of large sized timber when being fed without operator assistance.
For large Chippers with a capacity of 18” and bigger, including whole-tree chippers, a live-floor system is often used for the maximum feeding power possible as well as a large diameter top horizontal feed wheel. This live floor is either a steel slat system (often with spikes to grip the timber) or a large conveyor chain, often 400 – 800mm wide which the timber sits on as it is fed into the chipper. The longer the live floor the better the whole system works, but the design engineers obviously have an overall machine length constraint to work with as well which limits how long the infeed typically is.
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