Ben Arown-Awile said:
Kis,
How does that Brush Hog work? Is there a rotating blade under the housing like a lawn mower? Some of these briar patches form an impenetrable wall 10 or 15 feet high. Do you just jam the Brush Hog into them and it chops them up?
Just for the record, we don't have anything this cool in our arsenal. The civilian contractors do, though, meaning that if we can figure out a way to cheat, steal, or cajole one from them it's there for the taking. Therein lies the tale.
The civilians have a couple of these bad boys. They're contracted to truck their tractors and brush hogs out to the camp twice a year, beginning and end of the summer, to mow the lawns. They don't do a good job. Somehow, at some time in the past, they managed to argue that their contract doesn't cover roughly 50% of the lawn area, meaning that we're expected to do it with weed eaters. (If the weed eaters can't be made to run, we're down to using scythes and machetes while they're in the shop.) Don't laugh...you're paying me and several other E-5's a pretty decent paycheck for mowing literally acres of land with weed eaters because the contractors don't want to be bothered doing it and the department won't front the money for a lawnmower. It's not funny, it's criminal. But I digress.
The contractors aren't the only clever people in the area. We've convinced them that they must bring their equipment out on a Friday, as that's the only time our schedule is light enough to allow for it, so that they can get an early jump on the job the following Monday. They're also required to leave the keys for their vehicles in case they have to be moved in an emergency. "In an emergency", in this case, means using them for the entire weekend without their knowledge to mow the rest of the lawn, clear out overgrown roads, and obliterate as much vegetation as we can. As we have a diesel truck in our motor pool, it's not difficult to obtain the fuel to top the tractors off when we're done. No one's the wiser unless we manage to break one.
The cutters they use look very similar to this one. There are some huge blades underneath that chop the bejeezus out of just about anything. They're operated by the tractor via PTO. The back end is draped with chains to reduce flying debris. (Backed one up once. We don't do that anymore.) As a rule of thumb, if the tractor can make it through the vegetation, the cutter will handle it, but these are really built for high grass and light bushes. The problem I'd see with tall, dense masses of briars is the same problem you get when you take on a wall of blackberries with a DR -- the vegetation is so thick you have to start cutting at the top, but the machine isn't heavy enough to cut its way to the bottom...at least not in one pass.
For those huge briar patches, I've never seen an easy way to clear them without using heavy equipment.
I don't believe that I've ever anticipated a mail delivery this much in my life.
