Repair of Cracked Chute on Branch Chipper

[Don52]

My most recent project was to repair a wood chipper. The chipper had two chutes; one for leaves and finger sized twigs and the other for branches. The problem was the branch chute. When people feed branches in the chute and the branches get hung up, they tend to apply a back and forth motion to the branch to get it to feed into the chute of the chipper. This in turn applies a moment to the branch chute, which caused the recent failure. In this case the failure was cracking located on the top and both sides of chute at the flange where the chute attaches to the chipper base. As expected the cracks were in the heat affected zone next to the welds. I would have liked to add angle iron to the sides of the chute to beef it up, but I didn’t have enough time because my customer needed it for a church clean up. The original chute lasted about 10 years and I would expect that the repair will last as long even without the side angle iron, but I do expect it to eventually fail. In picture 4 you can see the penetration on the back side of the weld.

[Hartmann]

Looks good here. They should have reinforced those areas before it left the factory. Should last your lifetime!

[Daniel]

Picture 4 is a back penetration. This was done with mig right?
Nice repair

[Don52]

All of the welds were done with TIG. I only welded the outside of the chute. Picture 4 is what penetrated thru the crack from the TIG weld on the outside.

[Andy]

Looks like the original weld was cold. Looks like there might have been a notch at the edge of the bead, and that's what started the crack.

[Don52]

Attached is a close up picture taken before welding of one portion of the crack.
This picture corresponds to the right side of the reinforcement tab on the top of the chute, which is shown after welding in picture 2.
It does look like a cold lap on the left side.
Picture 8 is another close up of the crack on the top.
What do you think?