reviewer
Dunrakin
Agua Dulce, CA

This product really works very well - great value

5 star rating


JAN
4
2008
We have about 1 acre with pine trees, coastal oaks and the dreaded 'trees of heaven'. While we love the home and garden, every November we don't look forward to the amount of work required to keep the lot fire safe and free of leaves. We'd spend weekends raking up nearly 1 ton of garden waste, piling it up and hauling it off to the dump or paying someone else about 60% of the cost of this product to do it for us each year. If you're remotely unsure about whether this shredder vacuum will work as represented take my advice and buy it - it does! After a few unsuccessful attempts to buy it online with the Store Pickup option (our orders were canceled due to out of stock), we selected Home Delivery and successfully placed the order just after Thanksgiving and saved enough to buy the remote hose kit. Sure, it takes 2-3 hours to assemble, but its hardly rocket science and you only have to do it once. We have an older model 14 HP 37" Craftsmen lawn tractor and it handles pulling this with ease, even when pulling it up slopes when the trailer is full of shredded debris. Take your time while cutting the template on the discharge chute adapter (the most time consuming part of the assembly process) and you'll be fine - I cut ours slightly under size & made it gradually larger until it fit snugly and it works very well. I also found that a silver marker pen helped mark the area on the black plastic where I had to cut. It starts easily and reliably, handles grass, pine needles, cones, oak leaves, dry grass, wet leaves and only occasionally gets clogged (I recommend 1/2 width cuts if you have thick leaves or longer grass like we did as this seems to ease the clogging problem). Make sure you wear a face mask as it kicks up a lot of dust due to the suction, but boy will it clean your yard well. It reduced several weekends of work to a couple of days over the holidays and a much reduced neat pile of shredded garden waste! We found the best set up was to use 1st gear on the tractor at full speed so the blades spin fast at low speed and the tractor & vacuum does the rest - all you do is sit there and steer. The hose and deck adapter make the mower deck quite wide (even on our 37") so I'd also recommend the optional flexible hose kit. This way you can haul the machine behind the mower with the deck discharge adapter disconnected and use it like a giant shop vac for the harder to reach places where the deck discharge hose would otherwise get in the way and limit access. We even chipped up the majority of our 8' Christmas tree in about 20 minutes (including removing the branches so we could get them into the chipper chute!). Empty the trailer often since it takes several minutes with a rake if it gets compacted full of debris and is easier to empty when only 75-80% full. I'd also recommend using double hose clamps instead of one on each end of the hose as they can vibrate loose and come off during use so it pays to check they're tight before each use. I really do wish I'd bought this years ago, and no, we don't work for the manufacturer. I could actually enjoy the task of dealing with the leaves now!



I_thumb_up Craftsman 8.75 Torque Rating (206cc) Hard Top Chipper Vac is recommended by Dunrakin

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