If you are going to rent a wood chipper then you should probably make sure you have a few items to make the experience of using a wood chipper a bit safer than it might be otherwise.
There’s no real need to take risks with life and limb while cleaning up your property especially when a few pieces of gear will help you avoid 90% of the potential problems. Okay, I’m not sure what percentage of problems you can avoid but we’ll say it’s 90% just for fun.
Wood Chippers and Eye Safety
The first thing that comes to mind is eye safety. In the past you had to put up with weird looking goggles or glasses to protect your eyes during eye-hazardous work. Today there are a lot of decent looking safety glasses and goggles that will help you avoid loss of eyesight or just plain old eye irritation from small pieces of wood and dust flying in them.
If you already where glasses to improve your eyesight you might have to find a type of safety goggles that will fit over your normal glasses. If your glasses are the right type they may already provide enough protection but there is a good chance they are not really made to withstand the impact of thrown objects and won’t protect you from things flying towards your face at odd angles.
Getting some goggles that will fit over your normal eye wear can be an…well…an eye saver.
Wood Chippers and Footwear
This might get overlooked but when you are working with a wood chipper unit you will often be working in an environment that can be hazardous to your feet. Splintered wood can actually penetrate footwear and although it is unlikely you want to make sure it doesn’t penetrate you feet themselves by actually wearing decent footwear when using a wood chipper.
Besides stepping on wooden punji sticks there is also the risk of dropping logs, branches and other wood pieces on your feet which never feels good. Wear good foot wear when running a wood chipper unit to avoid this problem.
Wood Chippers and Head Protection
If you are working with lumber that is already on the ground then this is not really a necessary precaution but if you are going to be cutting branches from trees than a hard hat can be a real head-saver especially if it is a two person job where one or more people are on the ground and another is in the tree working away. Besides tree parts the person above can drop chainsaws and other fun stuff like that so a hard hat can be a good move if you are working below.
Hand Safety and Avoiding Kickback
There is not really any gear that can help with this but one of the biggest safety points to keep in mind in relation to wood chippers is to be careful when feeding material into the chipper. Different types of chipper shredders are set up in slightly different ways but kick back can be a problem as can simply getting your hands too close to the cutting head.
A simple way to avoid kick back injury is to not put yourself in the obvious line of kick back should it occur. If you put yourself on the other end of a branch that is going through the cutting head and it tries to kick backwards out of the cutting head you are probably going to be on the losing end of the deal. It might just be a scrape but then again it could be a nasty cut or puncture wound so be careful in that type of situation.