Friday: May 16th Truck and Equipment Repairs

The week came to a real good end today at Murphy Brother Tree Service. I got a start on my day at 6am and got to the shop early to go dump the chip truck to continue practice my driving. Once the truck was empty, I headed back to the shop to meet the rest of the MBTS crew. We started the day off with a tailgate meeting, and discussed what we had planned for today and what we had accomplished this week. Today, we only did tree work until about noontime. We started off by pruning a large Maple tree. This took no time at all. The second job we went to was a removal of an Ash tree. This job turned out to be a mess, mainly because as the limbs came to the ground, they splattered every which way. As always, MBTS prides ourselves on spotless clean ups, and left the customers yard better than it looked before we got there. As we were wrapping up the job, we attempted to chip a beat up piece of plywood, which we lay down when we need to driver trucks on lawns. This piece of plywood had seen better days so we cut it up and put it threw the chipper. Unfortunately, the plywood jammed the shoot of the chipper, and we then had to take the shoot off the chipper and use handsaws to cut out the plywood. I learned never to put plywood through a chipper. We over came the adversity and kept on with our day. The third job we did was another small removal of a Japanese Maple. This job was the quickest of the day. We chipped all the branches and cut the rest up for firewood for the neighbor. After this job, it was time to fuel the trucks before diesel prices go up again, and then head back to the Murphy Brothers Tree Service Headquarters. At the head quarters, we cleaned out all the inside of the trucks, fixed up saws and hand tools, and most importantly, I learned how to change the blades on a chipper. The blades should be changed or rotated about everyday two to three weeks. Our chipper, The Woodsman 15x was well due for a blade change after the crane job on Wednesday. Wednesday we were chipping in gravel and sand, and little rocks and pebbles went through, which dulls the blades terribly. I also learned how important it is to always have sharp blades on your chipper because if they are dull, it will be a lot harder to chip the wood, and it will put a lot of strain on the engine. We finished up at the headquarters around 4pm, and brought the trucks back to the shop. Yet again had another, I had another real good week at Murphy Brothers Tree Service Inc with a lot of great learning experiences to go with it. Tomorrow morning, weather permitting, I plan on going to help Kevin was the trucks.