I cut at the farm the farm has both tractor and skid steer , needed for the live stock operations.
I schedule with my friend who owns the farm time when we can work together and take down the trees the farm wants down, dead , dying , in the way. he runs the tractor or skid steer I cut.
we stack the logs near the road where I can get in with my truck and cut and load rounds any time I feel like , I am only doing fire wood , we do have a few logs set aside for the saw mill one of his farm hands has a relative with a mill. I’m always around the guys house anyway so it isn’t much trouble for me to drop a small load of logs. I get my sawdust there too (our toilet)
most of the time he runs the skid steer with forks on. I pile the brush he takes it to the brush pile , I cut the logs to manageable lengths for the path we have to get to the pile generally 8-12 feet .
however even given free use of machinery , time wise I still find times where it makes more sense because of the obstacles in the way or the distance to the pile to cut rounds and roll them over to where he can get the skid steer or where I can load them in the truck if it is a distance issue although not all that often.
generally I can fell it , buck off the first 8 foot log then go work on brush while he takes that to the pile , when he comes back he takes brush , then a few more logs and I am on to falling the next tree
it really depends am I waiting on the tractor or will the tractor be waiting on me ? If I am waiting on the tractor or spending the day as a chain jockey to get logs skidded out to where they can be picked up with the forks because of all the obstacles cutting rounds and moving them 50 feet to pallets he can come pick up and take right over to where they can be loaded at the road makes more sense.
is your bed rusting out bad enough to not hold a load any more ? if the sides are still holding a sheet of plywood in the bet often gets you more usable years
a Tacoma or nearly any truck less than a 1 ton run out of weight capacity long before they run out of room to stack rounds especially with side boards.
moving logs gets expensive quick , the question you need to weigh is what will the logs pay and what will it cost you to get them there? will your truck even pull that load ? having not sold saw mill logs I don't know.
say you pick up a equipment trailer and outfit it with a winch you get a good deal and you have 2500 in the rig , you can only load about 2 ton of logs on it before your tacoma can't safely pull it say that is 6 logs what do 6 logs pay at the sawmill? how far is the mill ?
