I am in the process of starting a Land Clearing Company, primarily Mulching. I started a thread trying to get information, opinions and personal experiences but did not get much feedback. I am open to all information, such as: getting into the business, people I should talk to, pricing, machines, mulching heads and designs, some do's and don'ts, track type. Any information will be taken into consideration and is greatly appreciated!
Cat 299D2 XHP with a Denis Cimaf head.
keep the motor compartment blown out several times a day, seen to many go up in smoke from trash on the manifold. go with the Cat 299, get it with steel tracks if you are going to do only mulching, stumps and rocks are hard on rubber tracks
Get a dedicatated machine, all the others are pretenders.
Im sure that you can google mulcher manufactures, but the most common ones are CMI, Tigercat, Lamtrac, Gyrotrac, Prime tech, Bron, Iron Wolf,(I may have missed a few). You need to figure out what market your trying to go after, and choose a machine size based on that. Any production mulching will need 400hp or more. A 300hp machine is a good mid size. If your not really getting into mulching too deep, then just buy a skid steer and a mulching head. Terex makes a good skid steer for that. FAE is the most common head. Usually easy to get parts for. The single bolt tooth is crappy to change teeth on. The new drums (I think its the texas series) has a better tooth design, and its easier to change the teeth on. Gyro makes their own head. It uses rakers so you cant bit off too much material, making it harder to stall the drum. Works well. Lamtrac makes a head too, and they also make a drum to fit onto a FAE head. Their drum uses quadco teeth. The advantage to quadco teeth is they only have a 3" holder instead of a 5" holder like FAE. This means that it takes less horse power to run the drum, and the drum is less likely to stall (smaller bite into the material=easier chewing) The other advantage is quadco teeth are cheaper, and they have several designs.