Customer Reviews

McCulloch MCS2001 14 amp Electric Chipper/Shredder

5 star:		(70)
4 star:		(113)
3 star:		(44)
2 star:		(25)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

Summary:

Works well for my purposes, which include a lot of twigs, leaves, brush, and ½" to ¾" sticks. The mulch produced is much finer than I expected, and is really smaller than your typical double-shredded commercial mulch. Assembly took 1½ hours, and was pretty straightforward, but no thanks to the instructions supplied with the unit. For the price, this is a very good unit.

Shipment:

Unit came 2 days after I ordered. Surprised at the speed for free shipping, but I noticed Amazon used 2nd day UPS air. I don't know if this was expedited shipping because of the nearness of Xmas, but I was very pleased with the timeliness.

Assembly:

Instructions that came with the unit were very sparse and provided very limited illustrations and narrative to help the consumer. A clear and detailed picture or diagram would help a lot.

However, after staring at the photo on the box, and looking at the various parts that came in the box, assembly was simple enough for my son and I (you really need 2 people). Thinking back on it, here is the sequence that should be followed (little of this is in the instruction manual):

1. First start with the leg, axle, and wheel assembly. Look at the axle, and you will see two hex bolts with no apparent purpose screwed into the axle: one at each end. These are adjustment blanks that should be moved in order to properly align the leg, axle, and wheel assembly to accept the body of the shredder. You will notice an empty threaded hole immediately adjacent to these hex bolts, each a bit closer to the ends of the axle. Unscrew the hex bolts using the provided hex-key and move them to the adjacent holes that are closer to the end of the axle.

2. Place one wheel on the axle and secure with the supplied large flat washer followed by a cotter pin. Bend the end of the cotter pin around the axle end to secure the wheel. Do not put the other wheel on the axle yet, and don't put on the McCulloch wheel covers on either wheel yet.

3. Thread the end of the axle through the opening on one leg (it doesn't matter which one - they are symmetrical), and then use the supplied long hex bolt, lock washer and flat washer to loosely secure (hand tighten) the part of the axle closest to the attached wheel against one leg. The lock washer should be placed on the bolt first (closest to the bolt head) followed by the flat washer, then thread the bolt through the outer curved part of the leg into the threaded hole in the axle which is closest to the wheel that you put on in step 2.

4. Take the other leg and attach it to the other end of the axle using the remaining long hex bolt, lock washer, and flat washer -- hand tighten.

5. Take the remaining wheel and secure it on the remaining axle end with the supplied large flat washer followed by a cotter pin. Do not put either wheel cover on until the end (just in case you did something wrong or you aren't quite satisfied with the alignment).

6. Insert the solid aluminum barrels (each with two smooth-bore holes) into the end of the leg, axle, and wheel assembly that will mate with the shredder body. Line up the barrel holes with the leg holes. This provides strength at the connection point to the body. Put the leg, axle, and wheel assembly aside for the moment.

7. Now let's work on the body. Using two persons to lift, stand the shredder body up on the flat pieces of cardboard supplied in the box. Unscrew the three black plastic-knobbed hand bolts that retain the yellow metal hood onto the black shredder assembly. Remove the yellow metal hood and put it aside. You have now exposed the heads of the four hex bolts used to secure the shredder body to the leg, axle, and wheel assembly.

8. Using the stronger person to lift, place the black shredder assembly over the leg/axle/wheel assembly, and line up the two holes on either leg (four holes total), with the four hex bolts on the black shredder assembly. Have your partner guide the bolts through the holes. From the underside, secure the bolts using the supplied flat washers, followed by lock washers, followed by nuts -- hand tighten. Don't put the hood back on yet.

9. Eyeball the entire assembly to see that is aligned vertically and horizontally. Since you only hand-tightened the axle-leg and leg-body hex bolts, it is now pretty easy to adjust the alignment by simply moving the body relative to the legs, or moving the legs relative to the axle. Don't worry, the set-up is pretty sturdy, it would be difficult to harm anything by pushing or pulling to gain proper alignment.

10. Once you are satisfied with the alignment, tighten the two leg-axle hex bolts and four leg-body bolts using the supplied hex wrench. Use rotation tightening like you would when working on your car. Half tighten bolts on opposite ends, then ¾ tighten, and then full tighten.

11. Snap on the McCulloch wheel covers on the wheels.

12. Place the yellow metal hood back on top, and tighten the black plastic-knobbed hand bolts.

13. Place the black plastic leaf and twig receiving chute on top of the yellow metal hood, and line up the five small bolt holes. The ribbed side of the receiving chute should be facing toward the wheels. Insert and tighten the five bolts to secure the chute.

14. Turn off the switch before you plug in the shredder.

Operation:

1. For brush and sticks under ¾" this unit rocks! I am quite pleased how quickly this shredder takes the little stuff and spits out very finely shredded mulch.

2. For brush and sticks 1" to 1½" - be careful! It is very easy to jam this unit by feeding big twigs too quickly. After jamming the unit, you need to turn it off, unplug it, remove the yellow metal hood by undoing the three black plastic-knobbed hand bolts, and then clearing the debris from the cutting blades or the large stick feeding tube on the yellow hood. I have found that the best approach is to feed twigs of this size using a feed a little, pause a little, feed a little, pause a little approach. You can actually do this pretty quickly once you get used to what the machine can handle as far as pace.

3. Leaves mixed with sticks seem to shred finer than leaves by themselves through the top chute.

4. Twigs by themselves, regardless of size, are consumed most quickly through the side feeder tube versus the top chute.

I chose the McCulloch shredder for my garden for 3 reasons: 1)price, 2) ease of maneuverability and 3) lack of annoying noise to my neighbors because of the electric motor. These features have all proven to be realized with this machine.

I have, however, a few regrets for having chosen this unit. Assembly was not very straightforward. The tubular leg/wheel assembly required some additional tools and head-scratching to accomplish. Once assembled, I was unable to successfully attach the chute to the chopping mechanism. On investigation, I found the spring-loaded bolts had been improperly assembled, and I was able to correct that by relocating one of the nuts and reassembling the mechanism.

Not shown in the illustrations is the fact that what appears to be a 12" chute into which you dump material for shredding, there is, instead, a black plastic safety cover which covers the top of the chute which has only a couple of small openings thru which debris must be passed (generally with difficulty) into the chamber for chopping. It does include a rather clever plastic "shove-er" that is used to force the debris thru the slot.

The instruction booklet advises one to use this machine only with dry material. In trying to chop up the corn stalks from my garden, it worked fine until I got to the roots (still quite filled with moisture) with a bit of ground on them. The "out" chute from the choppers is rather small and quickly became stopped up with the ground and wet chopped material. Clearing this requires unscrewing the 3 knobbed/bolts of the chute. One must then clear away the debris from the knives, and reattaching the chute. It is NOT a quick and easy maneuver. ALSO, watch those knives! They are very sharp and I did manage to nick a finger and shed some blood in the cleaning process.

This chopper is very attractive yellow, relatively inexpensive, very quiet, very portable, but from a practical standpoint, I would hate to be asked to chop an entire lawn of leaves in it. Very much like eating peas with a toothpick.

I had read all of the reviews on this site and others and felt that this would be the best bet to meet my needs: chip the wheelbarrow full of branches that fall with every storm, and shred/mulch all the leaves generated in my half acre of yard in the Fall so that I could mulch my flower beds while clearing the yard.

The machine is definitely well built - but it's not well designed. Although not terribly difficult, the instructions and accompanying photographs don't make it clear that you need to bend the legs in to fit properly to the motor. It would be tough to manage the very heavy motor, the pressure needed to align the leg to their attachment holes, and drive the bolts by oneself.

Issues in use: The hopper is too small - about half of every bunch of leaves I deposited fell back out. The sloped hopper is a good idea, but in application it served only to annoy me. I had to nudge/push every rakeful (real word?) of leaves through the narrow gap in the hopper. The provided plastic shovel/pusher works pretty well, but this is very time consuming. Before long the chute was full of leaves and the shovel was too short to nudge them loose. Typically by the time this happens the blades had become jammed with debris (no, I wasn't shredding wet leaves) and the circuit breaker tripped. Three times it tripped my house fuse, twice the units. Each time I had to take off the chute to clear the jams and was able to clear the chute at the same time. The chute is attached to the motor with three large thumb screws, so within 5 minutes you can have it apart, cleared and back together. The discharge opening became jammed with debris just as often as the chute and the blades, so every 5-10 minutes you have to disassemble the unit to clear these three clogged, but vital, pathways. The chipper did well with limbs and branches less than an inch in diameter, but larger than this, or pushing a one inch branch too quickly, will jam the machine and trip the circuit breaker (did this twice).

If this is to be a truly useful leaf shredder it needs a larger hopper that feeds leaves more consistently through the chute. I can't imagine the discharge jams would be any less frequent had I only been chipping branches, so improving this area is also needed. The wheels are nice, and at 70+lbs nearly essential, but a handle would be helpful, too. I like the safety switch, but when removed it is pretty small and easily lost. Perhaps a lanyard could be attached to it to make it easier to carry/store when not on the machine's switch? It would be nice if a catch bag came with the unit - but then again, that would be one more thing you'd have to remove every 5-10 minutes when you take the thing apart to clear jams.

I'm still giving this chipper 3 stars as it would probably be better at chipping brush than leaves - but I bought it specifically to mulch leaves and it failed to meet that expectation. After four frustrating hours, and only one bag of mulch generated, I'm returning it.

This chipper arrived about a week ago and I absolutely adore it. We live on a Very Heavily Wooded Lot and always have some kind of branch falling somewhere, so this thing is just the ticket. This is not an industrial sized chipper, so it won't handle "the big stuff" (which wouldn't fit anyway). It took me about an hour to figure out the best way to run it, but once I did that, it has been great and gets clogged very rarely. If you are interested in this machine, here are a few things: If you have a very large branch (or one made of a particularly hard wood), it's best to feed it carefully. Make sure that the chips don't back up into the machine if you are using the "bag band" so that a bag can catch your chips. And I've also found that it's not a bad idea to make sure that all chips have made it out of the chute before you shut it off if you plan to do stop and go chipping. All told, I am exceptionally pleased with the quality of this machine and am actually having fun with it. I'll have to ask the neighbors for things to chip when I finally get done with our backlog of branches.

I've had this chipper going on 3 years now and have abused the thing beyond any reasonable use. It has its failings (which I shall detail to follow), but the bottom line on this little guy is that it's a WORKHORSE. I have (had) 1/3 acre of brush-choked land and decided to get this chipper to help with the cleanup project. To date it has performed above and beyond the call of duty! My father scoffed at me for purchasing an electric chipper. "Gas is better!" he said. Then he saw this guy at work and ate those words with an impressed smile.

Pros:
- Will chip up anything you can stuff down its chute. Literally. Obviously, you have to restrict such things to branches, brush, etc. but I've put a 2" branch down this critter's gullet and it happily gnawed away at it until it was gone! Granted, you have to go slowly, but it did it with no complaints. Pine cones, vines, green wood, dead wood, no matter, no problem.
- Chipped debris is quite small (relatively). I filled 4 big paper lawn bags with the mulch from five 2" thick chinese privet "trees". Lemme tell you something...that's no mean feat given the amount of foliage and branches those things have.
- Very tough. It's taken a fair share of bumps, knocks, clunks and about anything else that happens when you're chucking debris near it to shred. Kept right on chipping with no problems.

Cons (in order of severity):
- "Leaf chute" is more like a small slit. Do NOT buy this unit if your primary use is to mulch leaves and the like. The slot on the top is maybe 1" wide and 5" long. Enough to stuff small twigs and leftover debris in, but nowhere near big enough to handle a couple handfuls of leaves.
- Debris exit chute a tad too small. If you're throwing a big leafy branch at it, the output chute can get clogged up with shredded leaves and forces you to take your bag off, shove a stick up the chute and stir around until it unclogs. Not a huge problem, but annoying.
- Screws tend to rattle out of their holes. Once you tighten them down REALLY well, they tend to stay put, but I've had to replace three of the screws holding various pieces onto the unit. Not a big deal, as they're common sizes and none of the screws are critical to the safety or use of the product. Still annoying.

A few tips on usage:
- WEAR PROTECTIVE EYEWEAR! This is a chipper and stuff WILL occasionally shoot out at random. Plus, dust and light debris will float around and get in your eyes otherwise. I've been hit in the face on four separate occasions and had I not had glasses on, I'd probably be in bad shape.
- WEAR EARPLUGS! While this unit is relatively quiet when it's idling, it makes a racket when it's working. After an hour of standing next to it chewing away, you'll be glad you have those earplugs in.
- WEAR GOOD LEATHER GLOVES and LONG SLEEVES! This isn't so much because of the chipper, but the debris you'll be loading in. Without good gloves, your hands will get torn up. The sleeves keep your arms from looking like a cat went nuts on you.
- Go slowly! Thicker branches (1" or so) should be fed a little at a time. The chipper will stall if you ram stuff in there too fast. It's not hard to unjam, but a pain to unscrew the hopper, clear out and rescrew it down.
- When feeding green vines, wrap them up in a "bundle" and shove them in. DO NOT feed them one end first! TRUST ME. Unless your blades are crazy-sharp, eventually the blades will catch on the vine and yank it from your hands. I was whipped across the face by the end of such a vine and have a nice slash-scar on my nose from it. Thank God I had glasses on.
- If you put twigs and small sticks in the hopper (through the leaf chute) and they get "stuck", just toss in a small chunk of wood or some pine cones. They'll get tossed around by the blades and will stir up anything stuck in there.
- Buy the debris bag offered by McCulloch. It's WELL worth the investment. Trust me, it beats the heck out of having to rake up all the chippings.

Bottom line: if you have lots of brush or such in your yard, GET THIS MACHINE. It's a quiet, very solid tool for any outdoor renovation project.

I have three electric "Made in China" chipper/shredders. One is the McCulloch unit, and two others are labeled "Chicago Electric" bought at Harbor Freight Tools. One of the Chicago Electrics is no longer in production but still running, but the other one is a current production model.

I discovered that these things are so "safe" (idiot proof) as to render them virtually unuseable. I remove and discard, or never install, the top plastic feed chute with the protective "flaps" and narrow openings. I wear leather gloves and a full face shield in addition to hearing protectors while operating these machines, and try real hard, not to be a Darwin award candidate and put my hand or any other body part inside the machine while it is running. It also helps not to put your face or body in line with the top feed hopper as chunks of wood can be ejected with some force.

New blades can be purchased from various McCulloch (MTD) equipment dealers for around $15.00 per blade or, you can order Chicago Electric chipper/shredder blades from Harbor Freight Tools for around $5.00/pair plus S&H. I have found that the blades are interchangeable.

The blades can be easily sharpened if you use a chisel/plane iron sharpening guide (local hardware store) combined with a piece of plate glass or other flat surface, to which you have glued a sheet of ~150 grit aluminum oxide sandpaper. Clamp the blade into the plane iron holder, set the angle, and run the blade back and forth on the sandpaper till it is again sharp. Remove the blade from the holder and run the blade flat against the paper to remove the wire edge. Periodically vacuum or brush off the sandpaper to clear the grinding detritus. Slightly dull blades seem to work better on large (+1") branches as they are less "grabby", making it easier to control the feed and not stall out the machine .

This unit did a wonderful job on a huge pile of oleander
trimmings. We found that almost any twig/branch material
goes best in the side inlet rather than the top.

Our local waste-management district offers a $20 rebate on electric
chippers, which reduced the total price I paid to $180. Billed as
able to handle branches up to 1.5" diameter, I found it handled
both green and dry branches of that size easily.

The only time the unit jammed was when the outlet was blocked and
material backed up. When that happened, it was easy (no tools) to
take the top section off to clear the cutters. (A safety switch
prevents the motor from running unless the top section is in place.)

The material expelled was small and of pretty-uniform size. It would
be a suitable mulch right away or good input to a composter.

The reason the waste-management agency offers a rebate on
chippers is that they dramatically reduce the volume of material
processed. In our case, a large (say, 50 gallon) container of
cuttings had the volume reduced by around 90%.

The major concern with any power tool is for safe operation.
Certainly, eye protection is a must, although the discharge spout
points downward.

My one safety concern is this: While the intakes (both top and
side) are located and sized to keep hands and fingers safe, the same
is not true of the discharge chute. If you reach your hand inside
to clear a clog, your fingers can reach rotating parts. It's vital,
then, to unplug, not just switch off, the unit before bringing
your hands anywhere near the discharge.

With that caveat in mind, I recommend the unit. It performs as
advertised and wheels easily from place to place. It's much
quieter than gasoline-powered chippers.

I am finding the McCullough chipper/shredder living up to my expectations. It's not going to crush through material the way a big powerful gas-powered machine might. Don't be thinking "Fargo" with this one.

On the other hand, it is much quieter - not much louder than an electric lawnmower - and it works its way through leaves, vines, small-to-medium size branches perfectly well. Like other electric yard machines I've used, I really like the lack of fumes. Compared to a gas chipper/shredder I used to own (a big Craftsman) it is much easier to move around and store. And it is way easier to start.

It did get clogged a couple of times with too much small green stuff. Circuit breaker trips, and it's easy to remove the top and get at the source of the clog. Does slow things down, though.

All in all, a great little machine that is well-suited to smaller yards in the city and is a lot easier to use than larger machines. I don't know why these aren't more common in the U.S. - they seem to be very popular in Europe.

The reviews for this product seem to be divided into two categories; About two-thirds of the reviewers say the chipper works great, the other third say it jams constantly, doesn't have enough power, etc. After buying one of these, reading the instruction manual, and using it for a while, I think I may know what's causing some of the problems. Page 4 of the instruction manual has a table that's supposed to tell you what size extension cord to use. The table is confusing, but the bottom line is you have to use either a 14 gauge extension cord that's 25 feet or shorter, or a 12 gauge extension cord that's 50 feet or shorter (the smaller the gauge, the bigger the wires in the cord; a 12 gauge cord can carry more current than a 14 gauge cord.) This is important, because the chipper draws 14 amps, which is about all the current you can get out of a 120 volt outlet. If you use too small an extension cord, the motor will be way down on power and the chipper's going to jam. If you use too small an extension cord for too long, the motor's eventually going to burn out. If you're buying a new extension cord, it should have the wire gauge on the package. It should say, for example "12 Gauge" or "12 AWG" (I believe AWG stands for American Wire Gauge.) If you're using an existing extension cord, if you look closely at the cord the gauge should be stamped into the plastic exterior in small letters. It will say something like 12/3 AWG. The first number is the wire gauge. Don't go by the appearance of your extension cord, there are companies that make big, industrial-looking orange extension cords that actually have small copper wires inside. If you're chipping stuff that's more than 50 feet from an electrical outlet, don't plug in another extension cord, move the stuff to the chipper.

I hope this is helpful, and happy chipping.

The McCulloch MCS2001 Electric Chipper/Shredder came quickly and was assembled easily (elderly woman who did the assembly by herself!) However, when I attempted to buy replacement chipper/shredder blades, to have on hand when needed, I entered an endless loop with no positive resolution. The Model number of the product was not recognized by several sources, and the manual that came with the product contained absolutely no part numbers. Bottom line: good machine without any support.