DK2 Stump Grinder Operation

hey welcome back we're we're here on dormady Road today where I intend to tackle one of the most significant stump that I have on my property that needs to be ground this was this was what I do some I do cut down some trees and this one was way out of my wheelhouse so I had a had an organization come in here of stump of a tree and stump grinders and we had some big trees removed including this one which was dead and they they ground most of them they did not grind this one because we we did not get the you know the we did not send in the request to determine where the where the where the electric lines were and the electric lines do come through here somewhere their equipment was very industrial and it would have it would have you know dug this dug this dug this way down so and gotten it out of the way the docs are here but the docs are here they're saying they're saying what the heck are you doing now bill okay actually they're they're wondering if I got carrots or apples or something but anyways this is a this a big stump and the the professionals equipment would have gone so deep that they were worried so they they basically left it to me with my stump grinder and I'm going to to show you the stump grinder in a second but the I mean this is a big challenge this is way I mean this is not just twice as big as as anything I've ground out here this is like you know three times as big this way right here in terms of the protruding seduction or is five feet and across the top where I have the the tape measure that's like 40 feet and that's 40 feet 40 inches and this is 30 into something that is not an insignificant stump there and it is it's it is Florida oak so it's hard I didn't have that down in sorry it's a 5 feet to 5 feet there's some this way anyways all the way from here out to here if I see all that all that root has to go or it's just gonna mess up the anyways just what it is so here's the equipment that I'm going to be using and I have I purchased it is a DK 2 stump grinder I purchased it at Home Depot for $1,500 check that $15.99 and I just noticed this morning that that they've now got it at 1699 I purchased it in May and I have gotten a lot of use out of it this particular property had a lot of downed trees from Emma and you know what I couldn't get I had the pros do and then this then then I bought this to go after all the stumps and and clean things up so high level I'm just going to tell you a little bit about it and then I'm going to get to work and show you how it works but again it's a dk2 it is a it is again a stump grinder with a 14 horsepower Kohler engine the grinder in the front is a 12 inch grinder and it has a width it can grant has a grind width of three and a half inches the the the grinder is is powered by dual belts inside of the about compartment here and the belt tension is is adjusted visa be the engine movement so you got one pulley back here one pulley on the rotor and and then there's terms to adjustment screws in the front and one in the back so you can you can move that engine back and forth to either adjust a stretched-out belt or put on new belts very variants and it's it's force it's four bolts right here it's very intuitive you can't you can't really miss that mess that up the other thing is it came with a useful tow tow bar that has a 1 in 7/8 class one receiver on it I would prefer that it would be the flat ends because that's more like a road that's more like a you know highway type of the setup and this is you know it even says it says somewhere around there do not take on the on the highway and then they give you a highway set up so it's not necessarily useful for pulling down the road you got to put it on a trailer if you're taking it someplace else so that's very useful it does have an adjustable an adjustable handle that you can see here so you can you basically need to get on it you'll see this when I get working it you really got to work this thing and it is it is heavy it is it is heavy and which is another reason why the tow the tow bar is good but the anyways this is adjustable right here so you can move up and down if you're tall or short or whatever the case might be and one of the things that that I did was the the the grinder came with a with the the this is your speed lever right here and it was mounted down here and right in the way cuz you're actually going is you're gonna see you're gonna use your feet a lot on this on this particular model so what I did was I I took this in a couple L brackets and I just moved it up to the top so that's that's low that's high I'm sorry high low and it's it's just out of the way I don't know why it's down there and the other thing that happened while it was down here while the lever was down here the wire actually on the table actually interfered with they had the pole tether so that was kind of a pain in the rear so that's all fixed and out of the way just a couple quick things about about this this mower this grinder is it is clutchless okay you need to know that it's clutchless so basically what what I mean by clutchless is when you pull this motor you pull I'm sorry when you pull the tether on this motor motor you pull the whole thing you pull all the assembly all the belts and everything like that so it's kind of a hard pull if you're weak it's not bad for me I'm weak I'm 60 years old I'm 60 year old weak but it's not that bad but I just want to point that out because a lot of these have have clutches and clutches are good for a couple reasons first they they cut they let you just pull and start this the motor on its own and then you engage the clutch and everything starts working but the other problem is that the the actual wheel the actual grind wheel is exposed to the area where you've got the footer so basically what you got is this is you got a footer for transport it's um it's up okay with a pin and then when you get to your site you basically drop the foot to put the pin back in okay and so that's not that's not necessarily a problem okay you just take your take your thing out okay you drop it down on your footer so basically now what's happened is and you can you control the bar because you're not going to do the work with that ass so basically what's happened is you now got the things set up the the grind wheel turns on its own problem is once you start it up you got to reach down here and fiddle with this thing and that's just not sequitur with me that's your hands are next to something spinning it at 3200 revolutions per minute it is a carbide carbide teeth on it I just see all kinds of bad things happening by having something like this next to the auger so what I do is I have this block I have a number of these blocks and I actually just I've got that auger around there just for this video I don't even have this auger on here anymore I'm soccer the the boot I don't have this boot on anymore because I think it stings what I do is I put my black down underneath the the pulley box okay and that gets the that gets the boot off the ground gets the auger off the ground and I can start it just like that so this mechanism find it's the way they make it be careful the other thing I want to tell you about this is the there's there's two issues that I have with the wheels okay the many of these the way this works is you essentially work side to side like this okay you'll see that that's that's the motion that you get now many of the the stump grinders support that with wheel locks and this has a wheel lock it's just a really bad one and the way it works basically is the wheel has a [Music] has a hole okay it's just an axle okay it's just an axle and it's a non bearing wheel so also it is an axle with a wheel and hole in it and what you have to do is you have to do what I'm doing you basically have to pull the pin you have to find the hole okay and stick the pin back in to lock the wheel once that wheel is locked then it will automatically they won't roll back on you okay or forward well if that looks like a pain in the ass let me tell you it is first of all this thing it's heavy this thing is like almost 300 pounds this thing is heavy as heck and the amount of times you actually have to lock it as so many you're not gonna do it I don't do it okay I fight it and when I say I fight it is I just fight the weight on the on the stump forget the wheel lock and just just kind of move forward your mileage may vary you may like toe heel lock I don't know I don't see a lot of people complaining about the wheel lock when I when I go on reviews of this thing and by the way the reviews are pretty good the other thing about the wheel that kind of blew my mind is very shortly after I got it the wheel on the other side locked up on me it just froze the wheel froze on the on the axle and it was the Dickens to get that off man I had it all card I had it up on a jack hammering the crap out of it and I finally got that off and there was a lot of paint overspray from the from the original manufacturing and I was wondering if that paint overspray kind of like goob DUP and locked it up and neither here nor there i sanded it off and I put oil on it and then I went back to work and and you know was pissed off but I forgot about moved on it sort of did it again and then I was like oh man there is something weird about this and what I did is I've now just made the let's throw the oil out now I'm using grease I'm using synthetic grease in there and that's why it's so black that's one of the hands like that's all synthetic grease and I'm using synthetic grease I'm using a lot of it and I'm changing it often plain and simple because I don't want to have to go through another one of those those um those seized wheels again I can't even tell you what it was because I guess it wasn't the paint that I that I that I stand it off I got that off so anyways neither here nor there you know about it so bottom line is in terms of this particular piece equipment you know a lot of people put reviews on before they've really used it I've used that I've now used this a lot the reason that I'm not done okay with everything and I'm not even halfway done with everything this is choosing one this is pretty big property with the work that I'm gonna be doing for my neighbors I now ten acres that I'm now gonna be dealing with and this takes a long time it will beat the crap out of you this type of thing but the outcome every place I've used this this this piece of equipment every place I've used this when I'm done I just look at it and I'm going I go wow that is nice you know it is so nice it's not to have stupid stumps all over the place the other thing I use it for is protruding root structures nothing better than nothing worse than tripping over your protruding root structures as you're trying to walk around your property I wiped them right out and I've talked to arborists about that and they're they're saying you know you can do that with roots and a lot of people do that with roots in a in an a you know like a development or something like that when some but when some developer goes in and leaves a bunch of trees takes out a bunch of trees leaves a bunch of trees that have protruding roots they they shear the top of the roots just so their their customers aren't gonna be tripping all over it so he just said you don't want to go too overboard with that and you know the bigger the tree the more you can do that the smaller the tree the less you should do that I can't give you any comments on that because I'm not an arborist but that's what I was told anyways well let's um let's kick this pig up and start working on this tree I do not use your protection on this I don't think it's loud enough you may I do use eye protection okay which is a must the other thing is you want you want pretty much full body coverage on this because just flies all over the place and out of the front I've seen it fly like 25 feet so if somebody's watching you ever make them stay on the sides so they're behind these these these covers and even at that look at look at what's happening to the covers I mean stuff is it's not now maybe the augur hit that a little bit but you know those covers are taken taking some hits over there okay let's stop talking and let's start whacking this is cold okay so this you know what you're gonna see as a cold start it's not going to be a problem it does have a it does have a a fuel of fuel on off much like a petcock so I got the fuel put the fuel on it does have a choke okay I put it on middle middle throttle back here I'm kind of goofy for a piece of equipment but we've got an on/off switch key so you know is what it is I don't know why we got a key but we got a key so you need to you need to have the key turn it's all gassed up I'm gonna get my towel put my glasses on towel is to clean my the towel is to clean like my glasses okay so here's the target and just to give you an indication if you want to start watching this I'm good I'm just gonna leave this on but I'm gonna cut a lot of it out this is going to take me hours to do all right so really what you want to see is what kind of work goes into moving this thing and then and I'm going to start it up on the on the hill up here so I'm not rolling backwards you get used to this thing but probably what I'll do is I'll cut out a whole midsection of this thing and then just go to the end result and show you what this thing can do so here we go [Applause] Wow alright I'm just gonna take a break just to give you a couple other thoughts now that I into this a little bit first of all from a spec perspective spec perspective this is rated to do 12 inches above the ground and 9 inches below the ground what you're going to find is above the ground like like here goes fairly fast I don't know if you can see this but I hit I hit a fire ant hill and they're pissed off but you know what the hell with you the hell with you so anyways 12 inches above the ground 9 inches below the ground one of the other things that when you see that movement basically going obviously it's throwing a lot of sawdust back which will turn to dirt as we get down to the ground level so what you got to do and I was just looking over here I forgot my rake and you just got to stop and rake that from from time to time I'm just gonna kick it out of the way for now because I left my rake down to the house but that is those are the things I just wanted to mention as we as we keep picking away at this so let me get back to work [Applause] okay well I am going to take a little break and I think you're starting to get a sense for how this thing works like I said it's a lot of work but you're really gonna like the outcome when when I get this done so I'm gonna turn this off and so I save batteries out here and I'm gonna come back when I get it basically flush I'm not a hundred percent sure at this point how low I want to go and like I said it's like an iceberg if you want to go nine inches deep it's going to take as much time it's going to take like three or four times as much time as it took to take the top off so working good the one thing I forgot to mention is this particular unit did come with a fresh set of of teeth for the grind wheel the teeth are in as best I can tell the teeth have a little carbide tip that is like welded on and as far as I can tell as long as that carbide tip is there they're fine and the point is I've gotten a lot of use out of those out of those teeth and I've got a spare set when something goes on those so anyways turning it off gonna get a drink you're gonna get back into it see you in a few as you can see made a lot of progress like I said every once in a while you gotta gotta take a step back and dig yourself out all of this dirt and sawdust will be going back into the end of the hall when I'm done however this is actually going better than I thought from the standpoint that there's not interestingly I've got these main route route sticking out I'm not getting anything in between those it's kind of like I got those main routes and then everything else is straight down or deeper which will equate to less work you know you need a couple breaks you know just really all you're trying to do is get it out of your way so you can so you can see and one of the things I didn't mention yet is it's kind of like operating this thing is kind of like operating a car with a with a blindfold on you really can't see what's going on in the front but to see it that exposes herself to that spinning auger which you don't want that either so you gotta kind of gas it you get it but all this all this sawdust just ain't helping the visibility so they've just got to stop and I got to get it out of the way then what I'm going to do is sweep it down so I can see what the heck I've done and what the heck I need to do second I can actually dig right I can't dig right down there it's weird but good so you sweep it back get your visibility back see I still got a lot of work to do up here all the way across the road the road here those things start another pile over here alright I'm gonna leave it filming for a little while back at this angle how about this angle [Applause] [Music] okay see if you drop Scott on and the lens there I'm sure I just smudged it all but okay so there you go that was the biggest stump that I have ever cut and we still got we still got quite a few left to do but I wanted to just tackle that one and I think I think what you saw was that the the dk2 stump grinder did a fairly good job it'll beat you up it's hard to work but that's what you get when you're done it was $15.99 for me it's now I saw this morning it's now 1697 at Home Depot the thing about the stump grinders you can look around but the funny thing is is that the fifteen sixteen seventeen hundred dollar range okay is like the residential stump grinder but from there there's nothing between that and like the the five thousand dollar semi-professional stump grinders and I can see what the difference is with those the difference with those those four or five six thousand dollars you got clutch you got better better wheel breaking you've got some foot levers foot level two two lever and rock your weight around and that's a clutch you know clutch so honestly I'm not a hundred percent sure that the outcome with a five six thousand dollar stump grinder is going to be different than what you just saw I would probably feel a lot different but you know again when I get done with that I'm kind of I'm kind of all juiced up because it looks good it I think it's looked bad for a long time and I've put up with it and I'm gonna tamp that down a little bit more before and before we you know maybe plant something or just let the grass go I guess anyways thanks for watching maybe the next review I'll do is on my my artic cat HDX 500 that you've seen a little bit of here today stay tuned

Channel: Dormany Road

Views: 26,999

Rating: 4.6907215 out of 5

Keywords: DK2 Stump Grinder

Id: 233HuWZw904

Length: 37min 25sec (2245 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019