Highland Forestry

Absolutley stunning machines Ed - what can I say?? They make some of the other machines around look like tonka toys!

Here's a nice novotny set-up.. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28iuWekGB5s]YouTube - LVS5&klembank[/ame]

Tell me about it.... allthought of, plus the additional insurance and loler inspections.. there's more to running commercial kit than just buying it

Who is southcraig forestry services??

Claudia Schifer, Paddy McNally, Roger Taylor, Duke of Grafton, David Croft, The Earl of Seafield, Lord Euston, Thain of Cawdor... cant think of any others off hand

Try Trees Plus in Almondbank.

You gotta be joking!!? More water than london aquarium about here just recently! Dried off a bit now but only two weeks ago we had flooding and the rivers were full to bursting!

Nothing like that but the other evening we had a really hard downpour of rain.. I was on my way home from the local town and noticed literally hundreds of frogs crossing the road.. never seen anything like it before, it was like some weird migration!

Well that was predictable.... he should have wedged it in the back whilst his mates pulled on the rope... or climed it and done a propper job! lol very good.... wish I could understand german..

Just to add to that last thread, the extraction length is very variable, some will be aslittle as 50m and others will be more like 400m - 500m or more. It makes sense to me to take on the extraction as I only get paid for the poles themselfs when they go off-site on the lorry and all must be inspected individually before being loaded so the quicker I get them to roadside the quicker I get paid.

I am aiming to fell, make and peel and extract to roadside 200 poles a week minimum. Currently we do approximatley 150 poles a week but will be increasing the squad, possibly doubling it when we start in-house extraction as we havealot of work to get through. Some of them are in very tight spots and others you could get a machine right up to them, they are normally marked in the wood and are 'here and there' rather than normal thinnings, this is because they are looking for specific tolerences and sizes of timber and not every wood is ideal for poles. As a % of the business as a whole I would estimate this contract is around 25-30% at the moment but would obviousley be more if we do our own extraction. I am being offered the extraction and marking contracts so I can do the whole lot, which will be worth a fair bit more money as the marking and extraction are hourly rate.

here's another one.. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NzIH185cqM]YouTube - Woody[/ame] I really like this, and would go so far as to say I'll be trying to get more information about them and costs etc.

arrghhh way too many skidder choices!!!

Give them a good hard crown reduction and mulch around the base of each tree to a radius of around 1.5m..... It wont be a guaranteed way of bringing them back but it may help. Failing that there is not much you can do but fell and replant i'm afraid. I'm sure Martyn would be able to do reductions and sort some decent mulch... when mulching around trees we use bags of garden compost around the base first and then plenty of woodchip over the top but you can buy big bags of pre-prepared mulch.

Just goes to show you.... the boys who are supposed to be at the top of thier game, protecting civilians are the ones who let us down. Complacency is a very dangerous friend. If this was a civilian incident and it was you or me who pulled the trigger we would be doing some serious time at her majestey's pleasure. As a firearms license holder myself I can say for FACT that if anything like this happened or even hinted at happening during an inspection, all guns and licenses would be revoked instantly. They even prefer firearms license holders to store ammunition in a seporate safe to the firearms and the bolts of the rifles in a seporate safe also...

Who's a pretty boy then!!

I'll come down with my .270 and start popping them off for you.. Failing that lets have an arbtalk driven shoot... 8-shot benellis at the ready boys.. I'll bring some 3 shot 46gm buffalos with me!

I'll go and fell them if that helps?? As it happens I have just spent a week turning a scrub birch and rowan woodland site into a smart amenity belt and have come across literally thousands of dead, dying or generally crappy rowans... deffinatley something up with them this year. They say that when the rowans are loaded with berries it's a sign of a hard winter to come.. some of the ones i've seen aound here are literally bursting with berries.

lol!! Grapple skidder is deffinatley the kiddey for the job... I want something that can do more than one job though so it's deffinatley a tractor forwarder/skidder I need. The grapple skidder would be great but I could only use it for skidding. Tried looking into what everyone else uses for extracting poles, and seemingly most of them are extracted by forwarder, but the forwarder only takes 5 or 6 polesd at a time due to the weight on the overhang and it is a slow process due to the size of machine.. This takes it back to a skidder scenario and from what everyone has said on this discussion it'll either have to be a county or a MB trac etc. Unimog is a great idea but I can't see it working well on the sites we are on, it would get trashed and cost a bomb to fix Perhaps I should buy the whole lot... a grapple skidder, forwarder, county, mb trac, crawler, unimog, suzuki jimney, skyline, debarking machine etc

is the teleporter for sale??

A load like that is selling for somewhere in the region of £130 around us just now gibby.. thats assuming its about 2m3

Personally, I would say that the trees have done thier time.. I see loads of dead and dying rowans every week up here. They seem to get to a certain maturity and then die off.. Fell and replant I would suggest.

Some impressive kit there Mr. Ed - our friends over the water use the big grapple skidders alot don't they? Think that would be a bit overkill here but would certainly work alright. The thought behind the county is that we can use it for hardwood thinning, birch etc as well as skidding out the telegraph poles. I cant use a forwarder because I cant afford one, and not all our polling sites are in woodland that has been racked so need a small machine like a county that can dodge about a bit.

I want to see the risk assessment!!!!

Kinda how I felt too Matt