Looking a gift horse in the mouth

I am not a fan of power tools. I’d rather wreck my back using a push mower (only until I have no lawn left) and wish for many reasons that all leaf blowers on the planet would simultaneously self-destruct. So when Troy-Bilt offered me the power tool of my choice to review – sort of like winning a kind of bloglottery – I hesitated and even gnashed a little in frustration at my luck not running towards a shiny new spade or a truck full of perennials instead. But when I looked out at my enormous debris-cum-compost pile it occurred to me that Troy-Bilt probably makes chipper shredders…

A friendly correspondent at Troy-Bilt helped me choose the chipper shredder 4325 which is their hard-core model capable of chipping branches up to 3″ in diameter. By now I’ve used it (by which I mean Z has used it while I delivered debris and watched) twice to open the path back up to our compost bins.

Out of the box it rolled easily into position and started up like a shiny red champ – 2 hard tugs on the cord and away she went. After a couple months in the garage it was more reluctant to start and if it had been up to me to keep pulling the cord, I might have given up. But once going (6 or more tugs and some monkeying with knobs), cs 4325 hummed away. Loudly. It’s really loud. Offer ear protection to the neighbors and put all the kids down cellar because as power tools go, this has to be among the most damaging to the drums. (My neighbors use leaf blowers so I consider cs 4325 their comeuppance.)

The shredder chute – the largest opening – is at about chest height on me and even for Z who stands 6′ tall, it’s forearm barking high. I guess that’s for safety reasons because there’s no way, even for a super tall person with simian arms, to reach down the opening and touch the blades. The chute also necks down from a good 18″ or so to about 8″ and then turns a corner before the blade house. According to Z, a well sifted armful of leaves could be dropped and sucked around the corner easily. All of my chunky debris (4′ weed stalks, armfuls of dried lavender stems, etc) needed a little more encouragement to turn the corner. Z finally settled on using a 1×6″ plank to push everything through. (Since a one-by-six can’t turn corners, there seems to be no danger of it, along with its handler, being sucked into the blades.)

The chipper chute angles out in the opposite direction – on the engine side of the machine – from the shredder mouth necessitating a complete shift in operator orientation. If you try to stand where you can easily-ish reach both chutes, exhaust will burn your legs or dust will blow up your nose. The lazy multi-tasker in me might have been annoyed by that but Z organized my pile and did the dance with grace.

The largest branch he put through (the chipper chute) was about 2″ in diameter and according to Z, the greener the wood, the better for finding the blade without getting hung up. He did also say that anything that could be encouraged one way or another to reach the blade would be chipped, no problem. My enormous piles of chunky yard waste were literally reduced to shreds and I was amazed at the uniformity and tininess of the resulting stuff. It makes beautiful mulch or a sweet layer for the compost pile. And all of the shreds were shot right into a sack (provided with the machine) which made clean-up and distribution incredibly easy.

To sum up, I’d give cs 4325 5 stars for being able to shred so much of my unruly pile of yard debris; 3 stars for a reluctant start (and needing to have a strong arm to pull again and again); and 2 stars for wonky ergonomics and design.

For clarity and full disclosure, I’ll say it again: Some fellow bloggers might claim I’ve gone to the dark side, but Troy-Bilt sent this expensive tool to me free of charge in exchange for an honest review.