Champion Power Equipment3-Inch Portable Chipper-Shredder with Collection Bag

Pros: pretty much anything that you can feed down the throat quickly chips. The top bin allow you to shred leaves and think twigs easily and quickly. The key is what you can fit down the feed tube: you may need to spend more time trimming off side branches and cutting long limbs at bends than you do chipping.Cons: following the instructions, you turn off the fuel flow to turn off...This can take a couple minutes to burn off all the fuel in the line. with the way ethanol messes with small engine fuel lines, this is probably a good practice, just takes time.Small twigs end up more shredded than chipped, regardless of which intake you use. Not a huge problem, but depending on what you do with your chips, you may want to keep the two separate.the discharge can get backed up, with the catch bag only about half full, I ended up opening the end zipper securing the end and having it flow through the bag onto a tarp....I was grinding up most of an old mulberry tree and ended up with a dozen or so feedbags full of chips so didn't want to have to stop so often (see note about turning off the chipper). comments aside, I do like my chipper and it work very well.

It came well packaged. Easy to assemble. It started up easily and runs great! It would have started on the first pull, however I failed to turn the kill switch to three on position…. Be careful not to overfill the oil as it takes a while to fill due to the location of the fill line and supplied funnel sits fairly flat. It doesn’t take a full quart.When chipping material, don’t get in a hurry and over feed it through the hopper. It has a fairly narrow intake. Also, I did get it clogged with wet evergreen needles on the first run. Make sure you see it going all the way through before adding more.The limbs and sticks need to be prepped so that they are straight with little or no bends. Good to have a set of loppers and a small hatchet handy to clean things up on the fly.The chute will stop you from feeding crooked limbs. On straight pieces that will fit, hold on to them and feed them slowly. On one of my initial runs I let go of a 2.5 inch piece and it quickly sucked it in and bogged the machine down to a stop. I had to pull the chute off to dislodge the piece. My fault though. After I got the hang of it this thing woodchucked for hours and did an impressive job. I have a lot of space so I removed the discharge gaurd completely so the wood chips would spread out. It will send them 20-30 feet out consistently. Overall this machine will take a little more time than a big rental unit, but for the cost it works great for occasional weekend use. I am very pleased with it after using it for a few hours.

Is it perfect? No! But not far from it.I gave it a strong 4 stars. This machine would get a perfect score if not for the hard rubber shoot guards and the wonky bag attachment. The shoot guards make feeding the machine very difficult. The rubber is way to stiff for smooth feeding and the bag attachment or lack there of is just a draw string on the bag and does not hold very well. It looks like the chipper bag was a after thought.Now to the good stuff. Very well made with thicker than normal steel for a unit of this size. All the welds looked good and the fit and finish was excellent. Large wheels for easy maneuvering over rough ground.The engine started first pull and runs very smooth. It had plenty of power to chew through green oak limbs with no problems. The larger diameter limbs 2"+ was easier on the machine when cut down to about 2 feet lengths before feeding into the machine.The chipper reduction size was very fine. Great for nice looking mulch. The shredder hopper reduction size was very course about 1 to 2 inches long.The instructions were well written and very easy to understand. Assembly was done in about a hour and metric wrenches and sockets were needed.In closing for the money this chipper/shredder will be hard to beat.Update:With less than 5 hrs. The chipper imploded. One bolt broke on one of the chipper blades and all but destroyed this machine. See pictures.We will see what champion customer service is going to do? If the pictured damage wasn't bad enough the motor is hurt to. Bent the crank bolt and damaged the crank shaft threads.Here we are a month later and still no usable repair parts from champion. They sent me the wrong parts.Champions customer support is god awful!They don't answer emails in a timely manner.When you call them by phone they put you on hold for about a hour. They want you to send pictures of your issues but they dont even look at them. I can not recommend champion products due to their very poor customer support!!Their is a lot more to this story!BUYER BEWARE

I’m editing my review… still giving a 5 star for performanceMy discharge discharge bag stitching has come apart and also one blade had a large chunk taken out of it. Trying to find a replacement blade is impossible. Champion web site lists as not in stock. Not useable with once blade shot and other dull.This chipper actually was a great improvement over my old one.Chipped up the limbs with out slowing down much .. 2” branches zipped right through… 2 to 3” branches a little slower but not by much.The bin on top could of been a little larger but overall a great machine.

I can’t really speak to its durability since I've only used it a few times. Still this is a good piece of equipment from the packaging to the finish to the engineering all very well done. The operation is just what you would expect. Everything I tried from 2” to leaves mulched in a hurry