Haulers.

[Kiwilogger]

Hi there everyone. I drive a TTY 70 yarder in New Zealand. Anyone else here in hauler crews?

Our TTY runs a 450hp turbo cat motor, 70 ft tower. 600 metres skyline, 700 main, 1400 tail, and a tagline too.

10 people in our crew, running a hot deck skid (no processors) all motor manual. We have a Komatsu D65 tractor for our backline tailhold (where we can) 2 Zaxis 270 loaders on the skid and we pump out about 1200 metric tonnes per week.

All we log is pine. Its pretty good where we are at the moment, running a scab skline system.

 

[SWE#Kipp]

Kiwi some pictures please

 

[Kiwilogger]

 

[Kiwilogger]

The cockpit......

 

[Kiwilogger]

One of the boys posing.... lmao

 

[Kiwilogger]

The cutover......

 

[Kiwilogger]

The tower.....

 

[Kiwilogger]

Here its about 550 metres to the backline. We had the sky out here running a northbend system

 

[a_lopa]

Thats some dangerous stuff!

 

[Sprig]

Hey thanks for the pics, cool. Didn't even really dawn on me that you had forests over there (my duh factor), always sort of envisioned nice rolling fields covered in sheep. So I have a question or three for you. I notice you gents are clear-cutting your sections, is this standard practice there? Is this a tree farm/sustained forest or natural growth? Do you do corridors for wildlife (you do have wildlife?) and how do you deal with things like creeks? What, if any, errosion problems arise, looks pretty dry around there. Do these blocs get planted right away, seed naturally, do they introduce other species when they do plant or stick with what was there origionally? And oh, how big/old are the trees? They are getting used for lumber and pulp?
Dang, now I got myself all curious guess I'll do some googling as well lol, but it would be great to hear your take on things. My little sis spent some time down there a while ago working on Lord of the Rings and was very impressed with the people and over-all beauty of the place and I dream that one day I can travel down that-a-way and also to Tasmania to check out the rainforest there.



Serge

 

[John Ellison]

Hello Kiwilogger, I enjoy your pictures. Very few hi-lead loggers around here.

Never seen a Thunderbird tower, the last one I was around was a swing machine. Is the tube telescopic or fixed? Are you able to use the skyline on a lot of settings? You have got almost all of it out at 550 m, bet you get a kick out of that. More pics if you can, would like to see your North Bend setup and a turn of logs coming in.
Also do they have to tie back the stumps when you cant use your mobil tailhold, or do they usually hold ok? Thanks again for the pics.

 

[SWE#Kipp]

nice pictures !!!
keep em coming

Most of the logging here in Sweden is done with a harvester and a forwarder !

 

[DDM]

Dang that looks cool we need some video!

 

[l2edneck]

Welcome to the site.Good pics!more more more!!!!!!!

Stay safe

 

[redwood logger]

Hello fellow yarder man!

Yes indeed Kiwi there are other yarder guys on this site. Things are a little different over here. We don't call them haulers, but yarders instead. I am the Hooktender (working foreman) of a seven man yarder crew. We use a Washington swing yarder with a 50ft tower. It holds 4600 feet of line, but I have had to long splice another 2000 feet on that before to reach across a canyon. We run a mechanical carriage, running skyline system. This may or may not make sense to you, since you seem to use totally different logging terms than I have heard before. Our machine is a little smaller then what you are using, but its the same game. I have been working on yarder crews for 10 years now, 8 of which were with Thunderbird yarders. I'm sure you will agree it is a very dangerous job, but when it gets in your blood you can't imagine doing anything else! I have a million other questions for you, but gotta go right now! Here is a picture of our Washington in action!

 

[Ianab]

So I have a question or three for you. I notice you gents are clear-cutting your sections, is this standard practice there? Is this a tree farm/sustained forest or natural growth?

The Radiata pine is an introduced tree thats plantation grown over a lot of NZ. I believe the biggest man made forest in the world. It would be grown on about a 25 year rotation, and often on land thats marginal for farming. Hence the use of the cable logging machines to harvest it in many areas.

NZ native wildlife is basically birds and bugs, no native land mammals, so wildlife like deer and goats are noxious pests and generally shot on sight. Native forest is mostly confined to parks and reserves, and a few privately owned areas of forest. The native trees are pretty low growing, long lived trees (400+ years to mature) so not many are harvested for timber any more.

The land is generally replanted in pine right away, they get established and form a new forest quick enough that the old stumps hold the hills in place for long enough.

The trees would be 2-3' dbh after 25 years. Logs would be graded out and sent to various mills, pulp factory or exported, depending on grades and location. Logs from one tree could end up in 4 or 5 different mills, some 1/2 way around the world.

It's a different style of forestry to what you guys are probably used to, has more in common with growing corn as a crop, just takes a few more years to get to harvest.

Cheers

Ian

 

[Sprig]

Thank you for the answers Ian, yes its certainly a bit of a different show up here in the North West, a lot of mismanagement over the years, entire mountain sides collapsing (our terrain is for the most part much steeper and higher by comparison), trashed fish bearing streams, massive habitat destruction, and appalling amounts of wastage. Forestry companies have been taken to task over much of this but in some of the northern areas away from people it continues, pretty sad what greed can do, our illustrious leaders have recently gutted some of the forestry practices codes and opened up areas that were previously protected, a real shame but for the most part it is all swinging around to sustainable yields management, too late in some places. I noticed from the posted pics is how amazingly clean the operation seems to be (could just be the mild blur of the images) which leads me to believe that you folks are a lot more conscious about waste, good on ya. In many spots around the province, including the region where I live, they are logging 3rd and 4th growth, mostly fast growing hem/fir varieties, 35-45yrs old seems to be optimum size wise. After several bouts of massive forest fires over the years people are starting to wake up about leaving so much slash on the ground, about time too but unfortunately many of our laws lack real teeth and will continue that way as long as the gov't gets its cut. Oh well, blathered enough here for now, thanks again for the information.



Serge

 

[Kiwilogger]

Hey thanks for the pics, cool. Didn't even really dawn on me that you had forests over there (my duh factor), always sort of envisioned nice rolling fields covered in sheep. So I have a question or three for you. I notice you gents are clear-cutting your sections, is this standard practice there? Is this a tree farm/sustained forest or natural growth? Do you do corridors for wildlife (you do have wildlife?) and how do you deal with things like creeks? What, if any, errosion problems arise, looks pretty dry around there. Do these blocs get planted right away, seed naturally, do they introduce other species when they do plant or stick with what was there origionally? And oh, how big/old are the trees? They are getting used for lumber and pulp?
Dang, now I got myself all curious guess I'll do some googling as well lol, but it would be great to hear your take on things. My little sis spent some time down there a while ago working on Lord of the Rings and was very impressed with the people and over-all beauty of the place and I dream that one day I can travel down that-a-way and also to Tasmania to check out the rainforest there.



Serge

Hiya Serge. The pines we are harvesting are 25 years old with a piece size of 2 metric tonnes. That means we are getting 2 tonnes of logs loaded out per stem dragged up the hill. We waste nearly nothing here, our pulp goes down to 100mm (4") cut face on SED and as bent as you like. We also have "binwood" which is the rubbish etc that we cut out to get a higher grade log. A lot of our higher grade stuff is local trade, pretty much all the pruned logs, and all of the sawlogs with a SED >12" and knot size <3" go to a local mill.

In terms of environmental stuff, our creeks have to be cleaned out, and signed off as "ok" by a certified person. We aren't allowed to do any earthworks etc because of erosion.

 

[Kiwilogger]

Yes indeed Kiwi there are other yarder guys on this site. Things are a little different over here. We don't call them haulers, but yarders instead. I am the Hooktender (working foreman) of a seven man yarder crew. We use a Washington swing yarder with a 50ft tower. It holds 4600 feet of line, but I have had to long splice another 2000 feet on that before to reach across a canyon. We run a mechanical carriage, running skyline system. This may or may not make sense to you, since you seem to use totally different logging terms than I have heard before. Our machine is a little smaller then what you are using, but its the same game. I have been working on yarder crews for 10 years now, 8 of which were with Thunderbird yarders. I'm sure you will agree it is a very dangerous job, but when it gets in your blood you can't imagine doing anything else! I have a million other questions for you, but gotta go right now! Here is a picture of our Washington in action!

Hi there redwoodlogger, we use a motorised skycar carriage on occasion too, and a shotgun carriage as well. I learnt to drive haulers on a tty45 Thunderbird, a similar size to your Washington,- 45ft lattice tower. I have never driven a swinger before, but, the reality is that they aren't as versatile for our terrain, and the distances we reach to. Although where we are at the moment running scab skyline, it would be absolutely cream with a swing yarder and interlock.

I love haulers, they are great, I love the sound of that 6cylinder cat turbo screaming, pulling 3x 3tonne logs up the hill in 3rd gear, full throttle.... yeeeeeeeehaaaaa....... :hmm3grin2orange:

 

[Kiwilogger]

Hello Kiwilogger, I enjoy your pictures. Very few hi-lead loggers around here.

Never seen a Thunderbird tower, the last one I was around was a swing machine. Is the tube telescopic or fixed? Are you able to use the skyline on a lot of settings? You have got almost all of it out at 550 m, bet you get a kick out of that. More pics if you can, would like to see your North Bend setup and a turn of logs coming in.
Also do they have to tie back the stumps when you cant use your mobil tailhold, or do they usually hold ok? Thanks again for the pics.

Hiya John.

The tower is telescopic and we use the skyline on almost all of the settings. At 550metres out, we had to have a 50 metre extension on the sky so we can get slack and bridle it across for line shifts. We tie back (almost) EVERY stump for the skyline, its just simple, no mistakes and dragging 1 1/4 steel rope up the hill if a stump pulls. Its only an extra 15min work to put 4-5 wraps of strawline on as a tieback. Its anything up to 2 hours to remedy a pulled stump. Not to mention the blood and sweat lost. The tailrope stumps are only ever tied back if they are suspect. Hardly ever tie back the non working side of the tail.

I will post some more pics in a week or two. Just getting a camera. The ones you see are taken from my phone, so thats why they are pretty poor quality.

Cheers....