Eric, one of pics answers your question about getting a lift up....
The first time we worked with Mike's new crane, he broke his load indicator wire. Since breaking and repairing it a few times, he's left it off. I'd sure rather he still had it. It breaks because Mike, unlike most crane ops, is not shy about getting the boom right in to the branches.... But, he is pretty good at estimating his applied tension, as are we weights. The pick never pops off wildly, though yesterday there were a couple picks where he might not have had enough preset tension. either that or he just had wrong some pressure applied a bit wrong or Scott made a cut or two a bit off, as the bar pinched a bit a couple times.
I forgot to ask the log trucker how much the~2200 board feet load weighed, but I'm assuming we picked about 25-30 k of wood and 8-10 k of branches.
Eric, the wood went to my normal log buyers, who are a sort yard. They sell the various grades and species of lumber to mills locally and overseas. All but three of the logs were fairly low grade, due to knots, sweep, and a bit of decay. I'm hoping we'll clear about $275 more than the $175 trucking and $400 crane bill. Which will mean we worked about 24 manhours for $1975.. Plenty but a bit more woulda been better. Lots of low bidders out this way.
Then again, i bid a bigger job last nite, but also reasonably straight forward. The other bidders hadn't a clue how to log, and had never used cranes. I figure 1 to 1.5 days plus some time skidding logs with the self loader's boom. (We can barely do the whole job without a crane.) The other bidders were way way high by a factor of 4 or 5!!! One said the job was out of their league...
After bidding last nite, I drove home to get the new camera to shoot this tree, which is just up the street from me. It's a 25 feet tall by 20 feet wide korean dogwood.... I've shot lots of pics of it..next time I need to get there 20 minute earlier....
