John,

MacKissic also makes chipper/shredder/vacs like their Leaf Cycler or their Mighty Mac VCB-258 vacuum/chipper/shredder, but I have my doubts that any chipper/shredder/vac combination, from MacKissic or anybody else, will do what you want it to do.

In order to effectively shred something like newly fallen walnuts with their husks on, you need a shredder that consists of a hammermill with a screen. Several of the MacKissic "Mighty Mac" shredders are hammermills with interchangeable screens and they would do an excellent job of pulverizing your nuts to a fine-grained product that would be an excellent addition to a compost pile. The hard cores of black walnuts would be noisy, but they would be pulverized. But to my knowledge, none of the "true" hammermill shredders operate while moving and picking up stuff.

With the possible exception of the MacKissic VCB-258, (which I really don't know anything about except that I don't like Tecumseh engines) the hammermill shredders won't pick up your fallen nuts. I don't consider the VCB-258's "hammermill" shredder to be a full-blown hammermill, even though it does have swinging hammers (how many?) and a screen. (And what is the hole size on that screen?)

Most hammermills just stand there while you bring stuff to them and feed it into the shredder chute or the chipper chute.

Any vacuum strong enough to pick up big nuts is going to suck in a lot of other stuff too. I think they are designed primarily for picking up leaves and twigs.

Last year I swept up a lot of acorns using a couple of good leaf rakes and a flat-bottomed shovel. I put them in big plastic baskets and carried them to my MacKissic Mighty Mac shredder and put them through its optional " screen. It was a bit noisy, but a great product that resembled very coarse coffee grounds poured out. I added it to an existing compost pile that had been made by putting a lot of brush piles through the same ¼" screen. That compost pile "perked" nicely. Incidentally, I would not add pulverized black walnuts to my compost because of the growth-retardant effects of the juglone that they contain. But for me, that is a moot question, because we don't have any walnut trees.

The shredders in most, if not all, of the shredder vacs have rotating fixed or pivoted blades that attempt to shred by cutting or shearing. For nuts, that's literally a "hit or miss" proposition, while in a hammermill the nuts are trapped in the shredding chamber until the swinging hammers bash them into small enough particles to escape through the holes in the screen. You control the particle size by your selection of the screen's hole size. A good range of screen sizes is available. I have ¼", ½", ¾", 1" (the standard included size), and 1½" x 2½" oblong holes (for wet stuff).

In answer to your question, "Will the smaller unit suck up and shred 2+ inch diameter nuts?", I don't know if it will suck up the larger nuts, but if it does, I seriously doubt that it can do a good job of shredding them.

MM

I had ('til the motor blew up this spring) a original Troy-Bilt chipper/shredder/vac. It had 4 large vanes to create the vacuum (and a separate blade for chipping). It picked up about half the nuts, made a awful racket and deposited them in the bag pretty much as they went in. A "screen" was optional for further shredding material, but I doubt it would work on nuts- probably just clog up like it did for most material.

The current MTD made Troy-Bilts don't resemble the model I had at all (IIRC, when Troy-Bilt went under, MTD bought all their lines EXCEPT for chippers) but I doubt if the design is much different on any consumer vac (I also have a very old Billy Goat, and the results on nuts are the same as the old Troy-Bilt). I'd guess the Yardman (also MTD made) are clones of the T-B- their website doesn't even show chipper/vacs.

My Simplicity chipper (stationary unit - hammer mill-type) did a slightly better job on nuts, but it was slow going and noisy (at least until the B&S engine gave up this weekend- it got real quiet after that). I just rake them into a pile, then shovel 'em under my nearby white pines that border my property or take 'em "out back" into some wooden areas.

Thanks. It sounds like I'll just keep on raking them up. Any I miss the dog just sucks up anyway. One year I made a huge pile of hickory nuts in the driveway. The squirrels went to town on them.

John

I used a 6-gal Craftsman shopvac with 2-inch hose. Or a rake. You can put bath curtains. Collected 2 wheelbarrows. I have a chipper Sun Joe. Tomorrow will try to shred them with the chipper to accelerate the compost formation