Forestwest 100mm Wood Chipper BM11070

Very solid mulcher but let down by poor design – This mulcher is extremely robust and really well made, so the quality is excellent, and Forestwest have been a good company to deal with in my contacts with them. The first thing to understand is that no domestic petrol mulcher with an engine size of around 6.5 hp, that I have ever used, can handle a bigger diameter of green timber than about 50 to 60mm, so you can ignore the "capacity measurement". The blades simply wont last if larger wood is attempted, as they chip fairly easily. The promotional video is, in my opinion, rather misleading, showing a 100mm log bouncing up and down in the mulcher chute. In my personal experience of several years mulching all kinds of materials, using different mulchers, this is pure fantasy, those blades would be so chipped as to be totally destroyed, reversible or not. On a more positive note, the motor is very easy to start and economical on fuel. The mulcher comes with a special t handle socket to undo the blade bolts, and other tools. The blades are reversible which is a very good feature, and the chute is hinged allowing quite easy access to the blades once 2 bolts are removed. The domestic petrol mulchers I have used in the past have been one of three designs, the rotating flail type mulcher with a blade attached to the side of the flails, the rotating disc with blades but no flails, and the rotating drum type where the drum sits horizontally and the blades are fixed parallel with the drum. The Forest west mulcher is this last design. In my experience, once the blades develop chips in them, which doesn't take long even with mostly green timber, and pieces of wood get past the blade through those chips, it then is able to jam the drum. The drum only has about an 8mm or 9mm clearance with the housing that surrounds it. The problem is that there is no easy way to rotate the drum to clear the blockage. This became a real pain, and I had to resort to levering the drum around with a crowbar in a recess of the blade carrier to free the trapped wood. Once this starts to occur, it just jams every couple of minutes which is incredibly frustrating. So, the Forestwest unit is cheap, robust and better built than a lot of the opposition, but sadly let down by its drum to housing clearance and propensity to jam. With a re-designed blade carrier with 4 spirally mounted blades as in the old push mowers, and a lever operated hinged trapdoor at the bottom to allow trapped wood to escape, this would be a world beating mulcher.