ESS

I have used a 360 high lead setup that used igland 8000 with oversize drums with an hydraulic motor driving the winch shaft. The clutches are hydraulically operated on those as you probably know, and the brake engages instantly , once the clutch is disengaged. It was very poor on haul power though with the oversize drums. I have had a couple of 8000 mounted winches that would pull houses down, the high lead was very poor in comparison.Igland used to use an accumulator to get charge for the clutch rams to avoid drag on free spool.

Certainly the ones I have been involved with have free spool on the haul back line.

Nor me, tbh I would have thought wedges would be more efficient .

Perhaps fashionable is a word that gets used loosely in timber terms. Hardwood furniture in general has gone out of "fashion", more modern materials, houses etc. and a lot of this will be cost based. Surely traditionally timber was used for certain applications because of its properties and ability to do a job . Beech furniture was in a way poor mans oak,massed produced in comparison, but steamed and bent easily for chair backs etc. durable, grown in abundance on suitable ground around which the furniture industry in places like High Wycombe grew up around. Ercol, Goodearls Risboro , ,,,Berrys of Chipping, all large millers/manufacturers in their own right, I could carry on with the list, but all gone or almost. It wasn't as much about availability as suitability ,timber was still hauled or trained long distances to mills because of this.

I could see it just pushing straight back out of the cut. I may be an old fashioned bugger, but old fashioned steel wedges take a lot of beating for tipping big trees over, particularly hardwoods.

Yes, I did wonder that after I posted. The elm burr thing was like a fever that ran through the trade for a few years. Best one I heard of was an 8 foot log making £7,200.it was a full burr and went to Italy. The tree had gone white and the contractor was given the tree for firewood,..only need one of those a week.

Depending on species Scotts would be the nearest to you.

Hardwood ?

It was Nidd I bought for.mid 70s. The prices I quote were from that time.They used 8qg and up,and ran 2 saw lines, cut 5000 hoppus week in week out. It would be Ron that was buying in the 80s? The £3 was for planking butts, anything that would peel was a higher price, though generally they wanted a bigger qg log, planking logs were 14 qg up and would tolerate small defects whereas peeling logs had to be blemish free. I got £40/hoppus for a 24qg rippled log early eighties. There was never really a hardwood pulp market in the north, although some parcels from South Yorks found their way to Kemsley on backhaul, I only ever did one contract, we were more geared up for bigger timber, but obviously with the amount of working pits there was a strong demand for mining timber , a lot of chocking gangs cut on site then and could use down to 5inch top diameter to squeeze 4 inch chocks out of , and with 2 foot straights there was little waste. We also had an outlet in the north for refinery poles through BICC, it was a useful outlet for rough oversize softwood and shaky oak, they also took smaller diameter at one of their plants ,price was a couple of quid a ton more than mining,throw it on a trailer tree length and cut the overhang off. Oh how things have changed.

Upholstery grade was never big money, 80p/hoppus delivered in when I was buying for the mill, but better than the alternative which was mining timber/refinery poles. There was a market in those days for sycamore thinnings for the turnery market , as there was birch and alder. Winter felled clean white butts were a different story , £3, + even back then exceptional rippled logs name your own price virtually.

I knew Gavin. My knowledge comes from buying for an upholstery mill when I was 18, all air dried and cut all year round. It was accepted that any exceptional butts that had to be cut with sap up because of contract time restraints would be destined for the same market. Parcels of exceptional quality were winter felled, and were rounded up to stop sap run if there was a possibility of time running away. Quality Oak and Ash used to be treat the same, the company I started with would have fallers rounding Oak stands in winter if they had to be summer felled. There is still a strong export market for white quality butts .

It very much depends on the year, I have seen Sycamore dripping in the first week of January. After leaf drop was usually the norm, through to February. Second grade was never a problem and could be cut all year round and air dried as the bulk of it was used for upholstery work,....settee and chair frames so colouring and stain not an issue, nearly all air dried. I have never come across a UK mill that end stacks Sycamore plank, I have however seen high quality butts that have been cut with sap up stood on end but with little success. Most of the higher grade gets shipped now.

Its sap that causes the problems. The planks get a black fleck running through them as they dry. Top grade Sycamore is winter felled when the sap has dropped to avoid the problem.

So what people are saying is they would be happy to pay the prices they are quoting on the full measure of this log considering the sapwood rot, butt rot and the problems from rot running into and down the stem from the rotten branches , holes etc at the top of the tree ? Makes it look expensive to me considering the probable recovery rate from this log.

I did a stint on one last year , for short haul work they are handy machines. Some were lengthened at the front and were ok,..its those that were lengthened behind the bogies that caused most problems as it puts too much leverage on centre joints.Its always worth bouncing the crane around on them to check for centre joint play ,bearings aren't cheap and if the casting is damaged you are looking at machining /line boring, which soon runs away with a few grand. Sounds like yours is standard length.

It comes back to cost every time doesn't it? Unless a contractor is in small thinnings full time then its a case of making the best of what you have. Harvesters that will cut big will also cut small, but it doesn't work as well the other way round. Cutting two row racks in a lot of stands is the only option to facilitate machinery, but even a few degrees of side slope can bollocks things, forwarders tend to creep and standing trees get marked. 50-80 cu/m days are common in poor quality first thinnings and with a harvester/forwarder setup needing to earn £1500-1800 a day minimum its not that attractive, taking downtime into consideration. The flip side of it is that timber stands don't have to achieve the quality of past generations,...most computerised mills are looking for 45cm max butt diameter which is easily achievable as a final crop. In a perfect world perhaps things would be done differently, but since mechanised harvesting its been a case of go with it or get out, there could be ten + contractors look at harvesting sites and someone will always do it, normally highest bidder buys the wood, lowest bidder gets the harvesting. although marketing companies are specifying maximum size machinery in some areas it tends to get overlooked when theres a few quid at stake. You only need to work crops that haven't been thinned to see the losses caused by suppression, this tends to get overlooked , yet damage in a thinned crop is the first thing that gets picked up on,..rock and a hard place.

Like I said, bottom line, every time you handle a piece of wood in the way you are describing adds costs, add another machine into the equation and it increases contractors costs .Tbh most of us will have seen some pretty shitty messes made by quad bikes when constantly used over wet ground , some sites are better left for another day, the contractor who is the one that normally gets the flack for things like this is only doing as instructed, if most of us had a choice we would work mess free all year round, but forestry ground doesn't always allow that, however dry the weather.

My bet is that anything would have made a mess in there looking at the photos. Its not as much a case of machinery being wrong as perhaps timing, but someone let them start the job, that's forestry hey ? Most landowners/ agents will look at the bottom line, would they have been better off financially extracting with lighter machinery extracting a couple of tonnes a time ? I doubt it with the added extraction costs , and they would have still had mess to reinstate.

A lot been shipped to India in recent years for peeling.

If you were to join the timber tractors and lorries group on F B my bet is someone on there will tell you exactly where it is.

From memory there is a backing plate on these saws that you would have to remove to change the tensioner.Pretty sure that on some Stihls you had to remove the bar studs to remove the backing plate. If that is the case have you made sure that both studs have been fully tightened into the crankcase when replacing, if not one of them could be undoing itself a little when you slacken the bar nuts and the bar not seating properly .

Keep an eye on Cheffins prices at Cambridge. I could see it making that. I brought a lot of beech and Yew tree off there in around 90/91 and there was a 1200 working at the top of the lane where we went in. Think it was the old gallops alongside the block we were in. Perhaps that was you ?

Did you ever do work at Box hill with the 1200 ?

What do you see the value of them as ?