Nowadays wood chips produced from raw material of inferior quality are mainly used to feed domestic and industrial boilers. For this use, a good chip size distribution and low manufacturing energy consumption are required. Cutting forces are still inaccurately measured during the wood chipping process, which implies the use of oversized chippers' motors. A test bench for chipping wood under reasonably realistic conditions of industrial production is improved by adding an indirect force measurement system with high bandwidth of 3 KHz. The dynamic experimentations give the data needed to compute the curve presenting the vertical component of the cutting force, which is composed of three sections; the first one presents the values of the impact force; the second one is relatively straight and it refers to shear stress in wood; the third section corresponds to the period between two crosscuts. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.