Have a question about a chipper truck? Get all your answers from the experts themselves here at Custom Truck One Source. We sell, rent/lease and RPO a variety of chip box sizes on the chassis of your choice.
Chip trucks, or chipper trucks as they are also called, are in greater demand today than they have ever been in the forestry industry. A rising tide, as they say, lifts all boats. As forestry equipment sales are skyrocketing, with tree trimming and tree removal work increasing, chip trucks are riding that wave in the North American market (the largest forestry equipment market, accounting for one-third of global demand).
Tree-trimming companies, production tree companies, and smaller independent contractors are buying chip trucks as an essential piece of machinery to ramp up their business. In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at these workhorses of the forestry sector and share important information for those looking to replace their old chipper truck or buy their first one.
To start, however, we must first look at the chip truck’s companion piece of machinery: the wood chipper.
Once a tree is trimmed or felled, there is a lot of heavy debris on the ground that has to be disposed of. Given the weight and unwieldy nature of this debris, the most efficient way to carry it offsite is by chipping the material into smaller pieces first. This is what the chipper machine does. It makes clean-up quicker, eliminates the need to burn debris (which causes toxic fumes), and helps recycle wood chips. These can be used as mulch, compost, biofuel, and pressed wood for a variety of applications, like veneers for furniture and pallets.
Once the wood debris has been rendered into small, manageable pieces, the chipper discharges them into a wood chip truck. This truck is essentially a chassis and a closed dump container that has been engineered specifically for the job. The container has an opening in the top of the rear wall that the wood chipper’s chute can be aimed at to fill the dump body.
You can get a chip truck with or without a toolbox. A lot of buyers, in fact, forgo toolboxes in order to increase the load capacity. Some larger chip trucks have a self-loading arm and a side-loading conveyor belt system. A chip truck will typically pull the woodchipper from behind from job to job, as they’re always working in tandem, but a larger chip truck may have a woodchipper installed on the truck itself.
At Custom Truck One Source, we receive a lot of queries about our inventory of chip trucks, and to answer some of the most common ones, we spoke to John Dean, one of our forestry equipment experts.
Excerpts from the interview:
Why are chip trucks in such high demand in the forestry equipment market today?
Mainly because tree companies require a chip truck to clean up on the job and haul away the chipped debris. They can’t survive without it. So, the busier they get, the more chip trucks they need. In addition, there is the replacement market as well, with buyers looking to switch out their old, worn out chip trucks for new ones.
Also, a lot of newcomers in the business start off with just a chip truck. A forestry bucket truck is acquired as the second piece of necessary equipment when they’re getting started.
Are there any downsides or other factors to consider when buying a chip truck?
For its application, I cannot really think of any. Except, perhaps, that in addition to the forestry truck driver, you will need a second driver to operate it.
Tips on how to choose the right chip truck?
Consider the geographical area you’re going to work in. If you’re working inner city, you’re really going to want a smaller truck for maneuverability in congested, urban areas. Also, think about the scale of jobs you are looking at. Obviously, smaller chip trucks will use less fuel than bigger trucks. But if your dump location is a significant distance away, you may want a larger truck to reduce trips back and forth.
We sell the standard 11 ft and a 14 ft, both of which are under CDL. (A driver doesn’t need a commercial driving license to operate a vehicle with a weight of 26,000 lbs. or less.) There are also 16 ft chip trucks, but those require a CDL, and finding CDL drivers isn’t always easy these days, when the trucking industry is experiencing a significant driver shortage.
The yardage of the 14 ft truck, about 20-23 yards, keeps you under CDL. Those are pretty much enough to keep the industry going, without really needing a 16 ft, 30 yard version. A bigger chip truck involves increase in size-related costs, too. The 14 ft can usually hold enough debris to keep you working without having to leave the worksite to dump debris.
At Custom Truck we sell a lot of what we call an 1166 Chip Truck. It is 11 feet long and 66 inches tall, and different from what the industry used to offer, which was a 1260 (12 ft long and 60 inches tall). The reason we went with an 1166 is that you can keep the same yardage, but the chip box is a little bit taller. A lot of chip truck buyers were having issues with the chipper chutes tearing up the top of the chip box with chip debris. Not all of it was going into the box either, so just adding that extra 6 inches has helped a lot.
With a higher opening at the rear for taller chipper chutes, we can keep a shorter body without sacrificing cubic yardage, and the heavy duty “L” toolbox package offers plenty of space to store equipment safely and securely. The 1166 chip truck comes on either a Ford F550 or a Dodge Ram 5500 chassis, with 4×4 standard. This smaller chip truck is perfect for hard-to-reach locations but strong enough to pull equipment to any job.
Load King, Custom Truck One Source’s manufacturing arm, is now manufacturing chip trucks for both the 1166 and 1472 sizes. Call for availability and lead times.
Custom Truck One Source has you covered!
We’re America’s first true single-source provider of specialized truck and heavy equipment solutions, and we’re standing by to help you!
Call us at 844-282-1838 or email us at [email protected].
Have a question about a chipper truck? Get all your answers from the experts themselves here at Custom Truck One Source. We sell, rent/lease and RPO a variety of chip box sizes on the chassis of your choice.