Excavator/crane felling head

[Tiptoes]

I’m looking for a felling head for an excavator and possibly a forwarding trailer. 
 

I manage some woodlands with various different felling requirements. One woodland I manage has a lot of standards and would need something to fell in the region of 30-50cm some larger but not many ideally delimbing would be useful to remove multiple chainsaw operators I am limited to a machine no more than around 14 t due to rides, this woodland also has Coppicing which is quite small and fiddly which would go for biomass not much more than 200mm stems. I then have another site which is mostly scrub which again goes for biomass and burning on site. I’m looking at hiring excavators in and buying a head a processing head is out due to all the computer and electronics. 

[Conor Wright]

Sounds like you're limited to a stroke head then, theres a few offerings with no computer. You will struggle to get a hire machine with the oil flow and auxiliary hydraulics, make sure you know the base machine's abilities before you buy a head. 

Maybe a hypro processor for the back of a tractor would work? You still have to fell, but it delimbs and cuts to length. Expensive though.

 

[dumper]

Probably going to have to hire machine and operator few I can’t think of a hire company that would have a clue about what your trying to do they just hire diggers 

 

[Tiptoes]

Not sure about a stroke harvester as I feel like I might as well delimb stuff by hand and use some shears/grapple saw. 
at the moment I’m looking at a jak tree shear for small stuff like coppice and a tmk tree shear for bigger stuff they do a delimber but not sure what it’s like in hard wood

[slack ma girdle]

I suspect that once the hire company finds out what you want it for, they won't let you have it. Most hire diggers don't have fops guarding which you will definitely need .

I priced up a stroke head for my Doosan,  and that was around £35k. I can not justify it.

Manual felling and a digger with a grab to sort and stack the timber for the forwarder will speed thing up.

Shear heads have a lot of limitations,  but in the right situation are very effective.

The other issue which is always overlooked is lifting capacity. It will be a very expensive mistake when you get it wrong. It is very hard without practice to judge how much of a tree you can lift.