Brush Grubber BG-11 Xtreme Brush and Tree Stump Puller Remover Tool with No Slip Gripping Teeth, Rotating Grip Pads, and Handles

My wife's family owns a small hobby farm in western Michigan. Several of the fields have not been worked in over 30 years and the pines that surround the farm have gone to seed with hundreds of small scrub pines and spruce trees. They had tried to bush hog them down but most just sprang back up with two trunks instead of one. The tap roots had continued to grow in spite of the short tree above ground. There was no good way to get them out, that is until this beast came along. We tried hooking it up to one of our four wheelers but it did not have the mass to pull out three foot deep tap roots so we attached a logging chain to the back of our F350. Most of the trees came out with the truck idling out. Only a few required a little gas to remove them. One of the best things is that the roots came out of the ground and left most of the dirt so their were only a few times we had a small hole to deal with. In three days we removed between 500-600 trees. Believe it or not we still had about another 150 to go to clear the field but my father-in-law got a cold and he was the driver for the truck so we had to cut it a day short. That leads to one thing to consider, you really need a minimum of two people to use this thing. One to drive the vehicle and the other to attach to the tree.Some other things to consider, first in spite of the directions telling you to keep the spring down, I don't recommend that. It will drag the spring in the dirt and will get it full of debris. We always had it face up and it kept it much cleaner and worked just fine. Some have posted that the spring comes loose and will be hard to find. After three days and the afore mentioned number of trees, our spring never came loose. Secondly, make sure you put the grubber as close to the ground as possible. That helped keep the device from sliding loose.The BG-11 is next to the biggest one they make and for that it is a little heavy and the spring is pretty tight. If you only have some small trees, you may want to get a smaller one. Having said that, it works just fine on small trees, as little as 1/2 in in diameter came out without any trouble. If you think you will need the 5 inch spread, by all means get this one. It works fine with the small trees as well.The handles on the side made placing the BG-11 much easier. The smaller units don't have these.All in all, this is a very tough piece of equipment. I would go as far as to say it is industrial/professional grade. Pulling over 500 trees over three days had the BG-11 working just as well as when we started. Other than some of the paint scraping off after dragging it in the dirt for three days, it was like brand new. This beast exceeded my expectations and I really don't know of ANYTHING that would have done the job at all let alone as well. My father-in-law, who grew on that farm, agreed. We were more than impressed!

This works excellently. I saw some people post disappointment. Not sure what their problem was but I was able to pull two walnut tree growths with about 5' tap roots (see pictures). I especially like this because the stumps were so short, I couldn't wrap a chain around them, which is the primary reason I got this tool.

I bought this to pull out sapling box elders. It is heavy, so quite durable, but not very easy to use. Had to try as many as ten times per tree because it would fail to grab or it would just strip the bark off the trees.I called the manufacturer and they were nothing but blamers of zero help.They claim its not designed for Box Elders because they are not a "shallow rooted tree" and using it on box elders voids my warranty. The US Department of Agriculture writes about box elder: "boxelder's roots are shallow and spreading"I suspect I bought too big of a brush grubber so it wasn't grabbing well enough, but the product says for"up to 5" trees" instead of saying a range of tree sizes. The trees I was pulling were 1"-2".Customer service wouldn't help me by product name, I had to recover the box from trash to give her part number. They should know their product names.Bottom line, the product does not work well and the manufacturer has every excuse in the book.

In the past, I have had great success pulling really large honeysuckle shrubs in tight places (where grubbing out with the tractor bucket is not possible) by just wrapping a small log chain twice around the base of the plant and tugging them out a tractor. The chain wrap method is very effective and does not cost anything extra. However, to speed things up a little, I purchased and recommend this heavy duty Brush Grubber.This device makes the overall process quicker and a little easier attaching to and detaching from the shrub versus the chain wrap method. Clamping this Brush Grubber onto the target plant is simple, but it does requires some muscles. In addition, I do not have to get down on the ground near as much to attach the device as compared to the chain only wrapping approach. Detaching is also much easier by just opening the jaws vice unwrapping the chain. This is probably where the grubber saves the most time and extra effort, as a wrapped chain can occasionally lock around the base requiring additional effort to remove.In all fairness, the Brush Grubber is very heavy and requires some extra muscle power to attach with extended hands and arms. There is also a small learning curve to properly attaching the device to the target plant. It will not always positively grab, and then it only slips up the shrub's trunk pulling off the bark. If the grubber is connected as low and as much around the shrubs root flare or below where the trunk forks, it works >90% of the time. The gripping effectiveness of using a chain-only approach is about the same or slightly less. A slow and steady pull always works much better than trying to jerk the shrub or tree out of the ground regardless of the pulling method. Jerking often damages equipment, hurts someone, or most often breaks off the top part of the plant. A slow pull always removes more roots regardless of the pulling method.The quality of construction and protective coatings are very good for being imported. If you have a lot of large shrubs or small trees to remove in tight or otherwise inaccessible places, this Brush Grubber is a time-saver over using a chain wrap only around the trunk method. Also like the chain-only method, it does not work well on shrubs or trees with trunks smaller than about 3/4". On these, I still use a shovel and a hand tug to grub out!

Sometimes the claws will slip up the bush and you have to rehook. It is very rugged.

Got this for my husband and he cannot say enough about how great this tool is for what ever he uses it for. Since I do not know what it does, I will take his word.