Grindin'

Very soon after Mark and Hattie moved into their home, the lone tree in their back yard blew down in a bad storm, laying down a few sections of their fence in the process. We were fortunate enough that the tree fell into the alley, and before we could get the chain saw out - a city crew swooped in and cut up the tree and threw it into a truck and left us with nothing but a three foot tall stump in the back yard (that, and the wrecked fence which Mark and I fixed shortly there after...). A bit later, I borrowed another chain saw and we cut the back yard stump down even with the ground, and Mark also took out a large yaupon in the front flower bed near the front door.

This summer Mark was determined to rent a stump grinder and finally rid themselves of these two stumps. With a couple of days of summer left - he finally decided to get 'er done! We drove to the rental place early in the morning and picked up the smaller of the two units they had available.

Of course, first order of business was to peruse the operator's manual. Didn't really learn anything more than what we knew already...

The unit consists of a gasoline motor mounted over two wheels, with the operator handles to one end and a cutter wheel mounted at the other end. You position the grinder such that the cutter wheel just reaches the near edge of the top of the stump. There is a brake lever on the left side which you engage to lock-in the left wheel only. This provides a pivot point which you use to sweep the cutter wheel side-to-side as it tears into the stump material.

A closer shot of the cutter wheel beginning to do its business. You take small "bites" at a time as you sweep the cutter back and forth across the stump's edge. Once you complete this location's cutting, you disengage the cutter, release the brake, and move the unit to the next position to cut some more.

Here you see we've worked our way completely around the stump at least once, chiseling away the material.

The process is repeated over and over until you run out of wooden stump material to grind. What you are left with is a hole with lots of dirt and wood chips piled all around.

Once you've ground it all up, it is simply a matter of filling the hole back in with the dirt and wood chips, and then encourage the grass to take over!

Here's Mark working on the yaupon stump in the front flower bed. This yaupon had been a large, multi-trunk bush - but we found that when we got down into the stump part, it was just a large ball of wood. But, the machine was very powerful and little by little, we got the job done here as well.

Using this machine certainly does not take the work out of the job - it is very tiring! Though we got the job completed by around noon - it was still quite hot. Horsing around the cutter and applying upward pressure on the handle to engage the cutter was still pretty exhausting. However, it would have taken days to dig out these stumps by hand using pick axes and shovels! In the end, we were glad we had the mechanical beast to help us get it done...

Tom