Treasures New & Old; Chewing, Chomping, and Grinding

The wooded lot needed sprucing (joke) up after several years’ neglect of the fallen trees and a record-breaking snowstorm the previous winter.

Karl and Hubert are neighbors on a wooded mountainside.

Over time, their respective tracts had become littered with fallen branches and dead, fallen trees.

They decided to rent a machine that would chew, chomp, and grind up all that debris which was in the way and was a fire hazard but which held the promise of almost unlimited mulch for a new method of gardening which they wanted to initiate on their respective properties.

Meanwhile, Hubert was about to realize his dream of having a proper shop on his land. The first step was to cut down a few trees and clear away some fallen ones.

Springtime was a good time to make this effort so one sunny Friday in early April, the two neighbors made a start.

They rented a chewing machine whose official name was chipper.

Karl brought his Bobcat S-220 over to Hubert’s land and rearranged the biggest pieces of branches and tree-trunks so they could be nudged or dragged to where the guys had stationed the rented chipper.

It is not a very big machine. Its official name is Bandit, Model 90 XP. It is painted school-bus yellow for maximum visibility among green boughs and dark tree-­trunks.

That thing on the top that looks like a dinosaur’s head is called the discharge chute. It is like a small version of a combine’s spitter-outer.

One notable feature of the 90 XP is the high number of warning decals on it.

On the right-hand side, seven Danger and Peligro signs, all different and each only a few inches away from the next, warn the observer that this machine is no joke. Some of the signs are very clear: “You will be injured if . . .”

On the left side of this Model 90 XP are another 16 Danger/Peligro/Aviso/Advertencia decals.

These warnings are not all alike, but amplify the message with clear and explicit details about the nature of the disasters a careless user can expect.

The guys were working fast and paying attention to the way they were loading the forest debris into the hopper.

Nonetheless, the women observers were doing more than their fair share of breath-holding.

“What if--?”

Were the guys really as impressed with the hazards of this operation as the women hoped?

And where was Hubert by this time? Karl was working alone for quite a few minutes.

Then Hubert drove up in his F-150 pickup.

It is not new a new rig. If F-150 were a guy, and if he had married right out of college, he could have a child in first grade by now.

This rig is ugly, big, and rusty but still useful. Hubert had been up on the edge of the property loading up more debris brought down by winter winds and the big snow before Christmas.

One observer was rather surprised and impressed that the still-green debris could be chewed up as easily as if it were bone dry.

Her grinder that attaches to her countertop mixer easily clogs if too much slightly moist food is fed in too fast.

Bandit 90 XP is not fussy. That power apparently cannot neither be stopped nor stayed. A 5-inch tree trunk was chewed up as easily as one toothpick would have been.

Where was the Bandit getting its power? The only smell was the piney perfume of ground-up wood.

Yet another decal cleared up this question: Gasoline. Some models of Bandits do run on diesel.

As to what one can sniff at the grinding site, how long will that pine perfume cling to the area?

Right now, the pile of chewed wood is fresh and six feet high. As the mulch dries out, the color will change and so will the fragrance.

One of the decals other than the warnings shows the Bandit company logo.

“Bandit” sounds menacing, but the bandit of the logo is nothing worse than a cartoon raccoon.

Real raccoons are born already wearing a bandit’s mask and the machine is made in Michigan, which makes Racky Raccoon a natural for a company in a state still enjoying tracts of forest land.

This masked bandit is standing on a tree stump, implying that the stump is soon to be chewed up by the machine.

One of the company’s founders admits that Bandit’s trademark mascot, this cuddly little raccoon, “hardly fits the rough and tough image of chippers and grinders.”

In the early days of the Bandit company, in an encyclopedia, the founder came across a picture of a raccoon labeled “bandit.”

“’Brush Bandit’ popped into his head as a catchy name for his new machines.”

He asked a graphic artist to submit a sketch of a vicious raccoon, complete with fangs and bared teeth.

The artist also submitted a drawing of an endearing little creature “shyly clutching a branch between his paws.

“The whole company fell in love with this second image, which has since graced everything from machines to flags,” the founder said.

One of the numerous warning decals says not to walk under the discharge chute when the machine is in operation. The sketch shows a worker being knocked off his feet by a projectile from the chute hitting him on the head.

Otherwise, the mulch is quite small and if you don’t get it in your eyes, it seems harmless.

While the guys were at it, Karl hopped into his Bobcat and dragged four large tree-trunks out of the way of the F-150 pickup and the 1937 Allis-Chalmers bulldozer parked at the edge of the driveway.

Have there been pictures on YouTube of dead elephants and whales being dragged away from where they died? How does anyone know what these look like?

A tree-trunk is easily as big as a dead elephant, equally inert, equally ignominiously at the mercy of others. One bystander suddenly felt embarrassed at the sight of so huge a living thing suddenly deprived of all dignity.

If you are going to buy a Bandit 90 XP chipper, be prepared for on-going maintenance.

Every day, you have to do 17 different things to keep the machine safe and working well. Every week; it’s four, every month, six.

After a year of use, the maintenance list is 30 items long. Does the owner keep a full-time crew employed to keep the machines safe and operational?

At the end of the chewing day, the premises were neater, the logs were tidily piled up out of the way to finish drying into firewood, and the bystanders were much educated about what a Bandit Model 90 XP and its sidekick, Bobcat S-220, can do on a normal wooded mountainside when inspired and led by a cuddly raccoon anyone could love.