BaumaLight MP360 Mulcher

We're seeing more and more interest in the idea of a mulcher all the time. We sell many of them on the front of very large compact track loaders, like Kubota's big SVL97, where we're adding cooling packs on the back to deliver all of that hydraulic horsepower down to a very aggressive drum with big teeth. This though is constructed a little bit differently. Baumalight still refers to this as a mulcher, and it does a similar job, but there is some differences in its construction that are going to allow to work on the back of a small tractor. Where those big compact track loader mulchers generally have big aggressive teeth that are going to go and take chunks out of the wood. This uses these much smaller ones so that your little bit lower horsepower is applied over a smaller area, allowing this to go and work its well through and mulch that wood up. 

In my experience of running it, it will mulch it goes through, and it pulverizes things. It does leave you a little bit bigger chip left over than what I'm used to seeing from those other machines. These are expensive attachments. The ones that go on compact track loaders are routinely more than $30,000. This is not a cheap attachment for a tractor as well, but it's nearly a third of the price of one of those. So little bit more expensive than going out and running a rotary cutter or a flail mower depending on what kind of work you have. But you're going to see when we run this thing, your ability to just run over just about anything you can find and chew it up is almost unparalleled.

Now what really makes this thing work is these carbide teeth here that are on this rotor. So when you kick your PTO on, you're going to start bringing this thing up to speed. Your power's transferring through this huge gearbox here at the back and down into the rotor itself. Each of these teeth is bolted on here to a little bracket, and then these teeth themselves are a little carbide circular dishes. I'd say probably about five eighths of an inch around. As these things go through and work, they're going to pulverize the wood and anything that's behind you and pull little chips and stuff out of it in order to give you a nice finish at the end, as you run over that stuff. As these tees start to wear, you can actually rotate them back here three different times in order to wear each surface in a third. So you can get a lot of longevity out of these little teeth. Carbide teeth are expensive to replace, but that little rotation mechanism allows you to get all those wear surfaces worn down before you have to replace them.

And one of the things that we're going to be talking a lot about here is this drum and its rotation. So you can see here, I can freehand the thing around here to show you that it spins forward this direction. So most of the time you're going to operate this attachment in reverse. Backing over the things that you're trying to grind up. I also found that I can run it just equally as well in forward as well. So if you're doing grassy things, you're not worried about running over something with your tractor, you can also run this in forward. 

Now, as it's spinning this direction, everything that it's hitting is being thrown forward underneath the tractor. Now most of the time that's okay, but I definitely had cases where I'd catch a chunk of wood or something and chuck it hard up underneath the machine. Something you're going to want to be aware of then is how soft the underside of your tractor may be where a lot of that debris is being thrown. So on this particular machine, the hydraulic filter, for example, kind of sits down there on the underside of the transmission. If I was putting a lot of hours on this machine and owned one myself, I definitely would go to the point of having some guards or something fabricated for the underside of my tractor because I would say it's almost inevitable at some point that a piece of thrown debris up underneath the machine would do some damage, at some point. 

We're out running this today on a Kubota MX6000. About 60 horsepower at the engine, 52 or so at the PTO. Baumalight calls this out as a 30 to 50 horsepower implement. So you can run this on quite a bit smaller tractor than what I'm out here using today. Its horsepower requirements are very reasonable for this 48 inch model. They do make bigger ones as well if you have more capable machines. As heavy as this thing looks, it's not actually unreasonable to have on a smaller tractor. You'll notice, I don't have any front loader or front weights on this machine, and I didn't have any trouble keeping my front end down. This thing is not as physically heavy as what it may look from the size that it is and the kind of job that it does. Oftentimes you're going to have a lot of mass, a lot of weight and an attachment like this. This thing is obviously engineered for the compact tractor market and really fits just fine behind these small tractors with a low horsepower requirement and a very reasonable rear weight.  Now your tractor selection for this attachment is going to dictate a little bit the kinds of brush you are able to mulch up with this machine. If you have a gear drive tractor and you don't have infinite selection over your speed, like you do on a hydrostatic, you're not going to be able to mulch as large of brush as you can with a hydro when you can creep on through it.

Your horsepower is also going to determine whether you're going to be able to keep that rotor up the speed as it's working through that woody material. So in their worst case scenario, if you have a 25 horse tractor, you can still run this machine, even though it says 30 on the sticker. They say it's okay at 25 PTO. If you're in low gear, they're telling you can only go through brush up to a half an inch thick. However, that same 25 horsepower on a hydrostatic transmission can go up to two inches if you crawl on up to it and allow the attachment to chew on through it. The faster you go the lower those brush grinding dimensions are going to go. As you work your way across the chart here to more of the size machine that I have, if this was a gear drive MX, they'd be okay with up to two inches but doing that slowly. Chewing through things, they're going to okay this attachment on up to five inch material. So a little bit about the job that we're going to be doing here today. We're working at our new Mount Joy location. This place is just a couple of months from opening. I'm really excited to finally get in here. I'm out working around the outside edges of the building here. We have some fence lines and tree rows around here that need to be cleaned up. And as years have gone by, as branches have fallen off of those, they've simply been pushed back into the fence row, and there's a lot of woody material lining all of these places.

All right, running the Baumalight mulcher. So that piece you want to start, and lower RPMs and then get the thing up to speed. We've got lot of mass in that. And much like a brush hog, you're just going to set it on the ground and go. Now the skid shoes on this are really big. And then you are simply just going to back up and go. It is something, to see this thing grab a hold of stuff and just pull it in. So this area that I'm doing back here doesn't have a whole lot of woody debris, and it is just about four, five foot high weeds, but I can't see what's in here. That's one thing you've always got to be careful with when you're driving into a new area with an implement, is what you're going to run into. And I can have pretty good confidence of this thing, that if I catch a stomp or something like that, I'm not going to damage it, and it's going to work through it and grind it up. Now, rocks are going to be an issue, but I don't have the same level of concern I would with a brush mower. I mean sitting behind me here, the weeds are as high as I am sitting on the tractor. 

So now, I have this on a machine that's going to be 52 PTO horsepower, so I'm at the top end of what this thing calls for as far as tractor goes. I could fly. When I get into heavy wooded and stuff, like a three  inch, four inch big stuff, some spots out here where there's just pile of branches, that I got to slow down. And that's less for tractor horsepower and just more for time that the implement needs back here to work. I'm back it up here into a literal pile of sticks.