I'm Aaron Graber with Ventrac and today we go to school we are on site on a college campus
with a 4520 and our latest version of the stump grinder and we're going to grind some stumps. So as
you can see we've got one stump here and there's a few behind me as well that we're going to tackle.
And we just want to go over kind of setup of the tractor what we're doing here and why this is
important. So on this college campus they actually already have several Ventracs and they use them
primarily for various types of mowing. So obviously they're not stump grinding every single day but on
a campus like this sometimes you have cases where you've got stumps hanging out that have been cut
down for a little while and you just haven't had time to get a contractor in or you don't want to
because if you have ventrac equipment already you can use a secondary attachment like the
stump grinder to knock those stumps out and save your campus and the budget a lot of money. And the
tractor is pretty friendly on the turf so you're not going to destroy this area. This is in the
middle of one of their sports complexes and you've got some housing kind of off in the distance so
this gets a lot of traffic you don't want to mess this area up as bad as some commercial equipment
can. We have the single wheels on you could run the dual wheels if you were ultra concerned about
ground conditions. It's actually pretty cold today so they're actually kind of solid. The ground is
fairly frozen but more importantly we are not on any severe slopes today so probably the highest
degree of slope we'll be on is maybe five degrees. So it's not critical to have dual wheels on
but it is important for maneuverability to have single wheels today. So being able to snake around
and work in between these things is going to be critical and having single wheels will help enable
that. The setup on the tractor is pretty simple. We've got our newest stump grinder on the front KC220.
And this stump grinder goes out to the side so it has a little better visibility to the operator.
The tractor itself is our diesel model and no crazy accessories needed. No um
additional setup tips for this one this is pretty simple. Sust drop the drum and grind these stumps
out. There will be some chips left over. If we were doing this job completely ourselves we would also
bring a power bucket and probably a broom to really clean this area up but thankfully on
site they've got a lot of equipment and they're going to be able to take care of that for us.
So we're doing just the stumps today. And uh with that I think we're going to get working.
So we have the first stump done that went pretty quick it was about 10 minutes or so.
And I got a couple things I want to mention. So during this stump
actually it was a little fresher than i realized at the start so it's basically a new stump so
it's taking a little longer than if it would have been a little bit older. But i think it
was a cedar tree because you can still smell it actually it smells really good. It smells
like those uh cedar blocks that you put in your closets. But anyway that's always a nice bonus.
The rear bar on the stump grinder is what I want to talk about so you always want to make sure that
with a stump like this this is a nice grass area when this gets cleaned up and hauled away they're
going to put dirt over top and replant grass. You want to make sure that you're underneath
the grade far enough and for this one in this area that means maybe four to six inches or so.
So that uh when you fill back in with dirt there's enough area for root structure to establish with
the grass. In order to make sure I'm doing that while I'm grinding because as you can see kind
of a messy job you got stuff everywhere. I'm using this rear bar dropping it down to feel
around through the chips to make sure that i'm not missing anything that's too high. What that's able
to do is allow me to get all the way down below grade on the entire stump in one shot without
having to leave the seat and and get off and rake things around and look for stuff. So that saves me
a bunch of time. And then at the end i drop that bar and push everything into a pile in the center.
Yes obviously you can see there's chips everywhere around and those are going to need raked up or
used a broom to clean up. But that's a pretty light job there. You want to get the bulk of the stuff
all the way back to the center of the stump. That way they can come back through pick it up with a
bucket cart it away and a lot of the dirt that's still around here will settle back into that spot.
So that bar helps corral the material make it a little more efficient and clean the area up a
little bit when you're done so that there's less of a cleanup job by hand or with other equipment
after the fact. So we'll move on to stump number two and then try to knock the rest of these out.
Another benefit of the Ventrac being basically a precision instrument is that I can do weird things
like this. As I'm grinding these stumps I spot a root that is well above ground and typically those
things are a nightmare for mowers. So what I'm going to do is very carefully drop the grinding
head on that root that's above ground and just shave it off just a little bit so that it's ground
level instead of sticking out and that'll help make it so that they can actually mow around it.
Well we are done. It's been roughly an hour or so. We did about eight stumps. Some big some
little and couldn't have gone any easier. The stump grinder is one of those attachments that's
just very easy to use once you get into a rhythm kind of figure out where to go exactly and just
head down grind away. We're done. Hopefully you enjoyed the footage. Be sure to subscribe
to our YouTube channel. If you have any more questions about the stump grinder
or anything else that we do make sure to visit us at ventrac.com and we'll see you next time.