The pictures attached here are kind of a before-and-after of several runs with the rotary cutter.

I found that I could only do a little bit at a time 'cuz it gets hard to get the cutter on top of the pile, plus the amount of work the cutter is doing at one time gets to be considerable (not to mention noisy [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] ) I wore my chainsaw helmet with ear protection the whole time.

The bottom picture shows what was left after running over about a half dozen small piles as shown in the top picture. Have to admit I was amazed at how little was left each time. Just shows to go ya that a lot of our brush is mostly air.

Note -- not clearly shown in that last picture is the larger stuff I retrieved from the trough when the cutter was done. It generally wound up laying too flat in the dirt for the cutter to get ahold of it, and was typically 2 inches or more in diameter. Not bad for small firewood, actually.

My final opinion? It's a lot o' work (hand-filling the trough, jumping on and off the tractor, etc.), hard on the ol' rotary cutter, and unfortunately kinda slow going. After an entire afternoon of this process, I had made a noticeable dent in the original brush pile, but that was about all. Would probably take me a week to finish it (or in my case, a couple of months of visits).

Since this episode, I have cleared more trees and limbs and the pile is considerably bigger than when I took these pictures. Unless I can get access to a man-sized chipper soon, my next attempt will be a burn. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]