Bear Cat is a powerful line of outdoor equipment designed to simplify yard clean up. Their products include chippers and shredders, log splitters, stump grinders, and wheeled trimmers.
A key aspect of Bear Cat’s chippers and shredders is eliminating the need to burn yard waste or dump it in a landfill. They help turn yard waste into more manageable biodegradable material that you can use as mulches or in compost. Their products all focus on quality, power, and performance while making it simple to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Formerly Echo® Bear Cat, as of August 2020 the brand name is now Crary® Bear Cat. Crary has long been the manufacturers of Bear Cat equipment, and they’ll continue their proud tradition of manufacturing Bear Cat in the USA at the same facility located in West Fargo, North Dakota. They’re still a subsidiary of Echo, Inc, but now dealers can work directly with the manufacturer, offering improved customer service and ensuring market feedback goes directly to the in-house design team.
What Bear Cat Offers
Chippers and Shredders
Bear Cat offers chippers, chipper/shredders, and skid steer chippers. Click here for an article that covers each equipment type in-depth.
Depending on which model you choose, the chippers and shredders can handle woody yard waste up to 9 inches in diameter. The larger capacity chippers can turn good-size branches into wood chips, while the smaller shredders quickly turn twiggy yard waster into mulch.
Different debris screens come with each model, so you can vary the size of the discharge depending on what you want to use it for, and whether or not the debris you’re chopping is wet. Wide feed-openings make it easy to handle a large amount of yard waste, including hedge trimmings, branches, and leaves.
You can choose road-towable chippers for stand-alone use, or Bear Cat also offers tractor-mounted PTO machines. All the chipping blades used in Bear Cat products are made from heat-treated steel to ensure a long-lasting sharp edge.
Stump Grinder
Bear Cat’s stump grinders literally make short work of stubborn tree stumps. The design uses eight carbide-tipped Greenteeth® cutting teeth for a fast, smooth cut that results in smaller chips and debris.
All three stump grinder models feature a 10-gauge steel body and mount the cutting teeth on the industry class’s thickest roter. The easy-access belts make inspection and maintenance simple, and operator-friendly controls ensure the stump grinders are easy to use. They’re also fairly compact, measuring less than 30 inches wide so they’ll fit through most doors and gates.
The SGACE “weekend warrior” model for backyard and homeowner use cuts 10 inches above the ground or 4 inches below ground level. The SGXTR is designed for farmsteads and small acreages and is 60% more productive than the SGACE model. Their commercial model, SGPRO, is an additional 38% more productive than SGXTR. Both of these last two models can cut 11 inches above the ground and 5 inches below.
Wheeled Vacuums and Debris Loaders
Chipping wood, shredding branches, and grinding up tree stumps can make quite a mess in the yard. Fallen leaves and other light, dry debris can also contribute to the unsightly mess. To clean all that up quickly, Bear Cat offers four wheeled vacuums.
These vacuums quickly pick up leaves, grass, sawdust, and more. Bear Cat offers push models or 3-speed, self–propelled vacuums that can go 1 to 3 mph. You can also adjust the vacuums’ nozzle height from 0.25 inches to 4.5 inches to accommodate all types of terrain. It’s easy to vacuum the yard using these walk-behind vacuums, and there’s an optional hose attachment that lets you get hard-to-reach places as well.
For more heavy-duty cleanup and loading large amounts of yard waste into a truck, Bear Cat’s Debris Loaders make it easy to pick up leaves, grass, and other light debris. The large, commercial-grade, steel-ribbed hose lets you clean up large amounts of debris quickly and efficiently.
What You Can do with Yard Waste
Bear Cat equipment makes it easy for you to clean up yard waste and cut it down to a more manageable size. But once you’ve chipped, shredded, ground, and/or vacuumed yard waste, what do you do with it?
If you just want to get rid of the yard waste, communities often have a location specified for dumping green waste. Some even have yard-waste recycling programs that you can take advantage of.
You may also want to use the yard waste, or if you’re cleaning up yards for a client they might be interested in keeping the chipped and shredded material. Wood chips, shredded leaves and twigs, and similar types of yard waste are a wonderful ingredient for compost.
You can also use most kinds of shredded and chipped yard waste as mulch. There are some trees, like black walnut, that can stunt plant growth if you use it as fresh mulch but the chances of getting too much of that in most shredded yard waste is slim. You’re unlikely to encounter problems using wood mulch, but if you’re worried you can always compost the wood before using it.
Here at Richardson Saw, we stock a variety of Bear Cat products. They’re not all listed on our website, but you can see the full product catalog online at BearCatProducts.com.
