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.