Bron Afon Community Housing is a social enterprise, established in 2008, when Torfaen Council tenants voted for Bron Afon to be their new landlord. Since then, they’ve been bringing homes up to Welsh Housing Quality Standards, covering construction, community regeneration and support. Rob Richards, Senior Surveyor for Bron Afon oversees the entire tree stock, totalling around 5,500 trees over multiple tree areas. To help them manage the ever-growing population, Rob turned to GreenMech.
For a long while Rob and his team of 3 guys have used chippers for the tree maintenance work and when the time came to replace their existing machine, they hired a GreenMech. “The guys were happy with that so when we came to make a purchasing decision it was an easy choice.” The team settled on the QuadChip 160, with its 360o turntable, allowing safe operation at the roadside. “The USP of this machine was the safety element that came with the turntable. This allows definitive positioning of the infeed chute for safe and convenient working at the road-side or in restricted spaces.”
Powered by a 34hp Kubota turbo-charged diesel engine, the QuadChip160 offers exceptional crushing of difficult branches and woody brash, provided by twin vertical feed rollers and a large 160mm x 230mm letterbox opening. This road tow chipper comes with a discharge chute that rotates 280o and folds down for compact transport and storage. All standard units since June 2015 have been produced as Mark II models which feature improved blade accessibility, a 4 bladed flywheel and locking mechanism to maintain the flywheel in a set position whilst conducting blade maintenance.
Final word from Rob, “The team are familiar with working with chippers and adapting to this one was straight forward. It’s user friendly and it gives us useable chip which we recycle on shrub beds and unmaintained areas of land to suppress weeds and brambles etc.”
