Yarding Pictures

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The yarder was running yesterday. It really does rock like a teeter totter.
Still backfires and the drum brakes for the skyline were not holding very well.
The operator thought that was because they were wet. But, how did the brakes work then back when the thing was new? It rained here :) in the
1950's too, or so my mom told me.
 
Yeah, the brakes. I think I mentioned that. They work like that when they're dry too. What is really annoying is when the haul back drum spins and throws a 'backlash' of line back up into the heffer shaft and everything grinds to a halt.

The only way to remove the haul back from the heffershaft is with a cutting torch.

Every turn they get to the landing is a triumph. Congratulate them for me.
 
They had some success at deer hunting and I think somebody, a grandson got an elk, so back to yarding. They were cleaning up the first corridor today and I marked some trees to cut for guylines on the next setting. Which poses the problem of how long will the yarder engineer/chaser/loader operator last on a (I can't think of the terminology suddenly) 2 level landing? Step landing. I'm suggesting he build a slide for getting down. Here's some actual turns coming in. The beast is still backfiring like crazy.
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Here's the chaser.
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Another turn...cleanup.
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Some modifications to the cab. I suggested duct tape to plug some holes in the new roof.
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I walked over what they've logged and it looks darned good!
 
They had some success at deer hunting and I think somebody, a grandson got an elk, so back to yarding. They were cleaning up the first corridor today and I marked some trees to cut for guylines on the next setting. Which poses the problem of how long will the yarder engineer/chaser/loader operator last on a (I can't think of the terminology suddenly) 2 level landing? Step landing. I'm suggesting he build a slide for getting down. Here's some actual turns coming in. The beast is still backfiring like crazy.

If I'm thinking of what you are describing....we call it a jump up landing. The yarder sits up higher, say above a road, and the logs are landed below.
 
"Looks darned good", really. What looks darned good, nothing?:( :greenchainsaw:

Slowp why the "no" in your sig?

Answer to first part. Not much banging up and scarring of the leave trees.

Answer to the second part. I am what the loggers call "the forester" and I frequently have to say NO to their demands. Like, give us your paint gun and we'll make it into a clearcut...NO. Can't we just take the skidder down that 95% muddy slope and drag the logs down the creek......NO. If you'd let us
....NO. And so on.
 
Answer to first part. Not much banging up and scarring of the leave trees.

So they just take pines or the trees that are left.

Answer to the second part. I am what the loggers call "the forester" and I frequently have to say NO to their demands. Like, give us your paint gun and we'll make it into a clearcut...NO. Can't we just take the skidder down that 95% muddy slope and drag the logs down the creek......NO. If you'd let us
....NO. And so on.

"The forester", I didn't see the "forester" in any Axemen episodes, I guess you just come at certain times or are you on the job most of the time? Sounds to me like they need you more than they think.
 
The pictures you'll see from me that are recent, are all in thinnings. Not a clearcut. The trees to cut are usually marked with paint, although sometimes the leave trees are marked. So, these guys have to go in and work around other trees, trying to get the cut trees on the ground without banging up the leave trees. Then, you bring lines, which need to run straight, down the hill and yard trees across the hill to the corridor where they switch direction more and go up, and there's more chance for the leave trees to get knocked over or badly scarred. It takes a bit more effort than you saw on Axemen to do this. Winter is a good time to be yarding because the bark is tight. Late Spring is the worst, the sap is rising and the bark sloughs off easily.

Nope, they didn't have much about foresters on Axemen and that's probably a good thing. When it looked like they were going to film here, I was planning on hiding out. I did want to see their production though.

I'm either not on the job enough or when I find a bad thing, too much. I am told I'm unusual, I prefer the woods to the office so I'm out every day pretty much. Thinnings take a lot more time than clearcuts for us too.

We're pretty much considered a nuisance. The only piece of equipment I'm an expert with is my paintgun.:) It creates oohs and ahhs when I paint a tree and then the question of, "Can we have it?" To which the answer is ....

NO.
 
Do you have a pic of what the hill looks like after a select cut? It does sound like a whole other ball game with leaving trees. I am sure your popular on the hill. :greenchainsaw:

I have talked to a few property owners in the Adirondacks and all said the same thing. You really need to be specific about the trees to be cut and the trees to left and always the loggers will take a few trees they were told not too.

I should look up a forester and cruise my place with him just to get an idea of my options and what would be best for the life of the healthier younger trees. What do they charge to come out for a day?
 
Answer to first part. Not much banging up and scarring of the leave trees.

Answer to the second part. I am what the loggers call "the forester" and I frequently have to say NO to their demands. Like, give us your paint gun and we'll make it into a clearcut...NO. Can't we just take the skidder down that 95% muddy slope and drag the logs down the creek......NO. If you'd let us
....NO. And so on.

LOL...I like that NO in your signature. Maybe I'll change mine to "Well, it wouldn't hurt anything if we..." or maybe "I didn't see anything about that in the THP". And there's always, "Okay boys, as soon as she's gone we'll...." The foresters I work with don't usually say NO. They're more inclined to saying things like "When do you think you'll finish?" Or "Try to get a little more side-hill with those skid trails". Another good one is "Tell that SOB in the red Kenworth to quit trying to eat a sandwhich, drink a cup of coffee, talk on the CB, and get around a double switchback all at the same time...He almost got me again today". I usually tell him that there's plenty of foresters but good truck drivers are hard to find.:)
 
Here's a few. The first by a logger who cares how things look, and he logged along the busiest road on the forest. There are some very good loggers around here. A lot of our "arguments" are done with humor. My friend hired a guy, told him how she wanted it to look--NO MARKING and he did a beautiful and silviculturally sound piece of work. She wants him back in 15 years to log it again. I don't know what rates are for cruising. I'm going to help the friend mentioned and pay will probably be beer and hotdogs around a fire. I'm only a forester in name, merely have a 2 year degree and that doesn't mean much to the educated ones.

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The above picture is pre-yarding. The yarding didn't make it look any different except for the logs being gone. The crew was good, but then they drifted away during the owl seasonal shut down and he never got the same crew again. We had a daily discussion in February on this unit. It went like this.

Logger: How come those guys across the road can log all year but I can't.

Me: Because the Owl Circle on the map is that way.

Logger: (repeats the question)

Me: Everytime you ask that I will find a scarred up tree to point out to youl.

That made him determined not to do any scarring and...he was pretty successful.:clap:

Here's the crew across the road yarding.
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LOL...I like that NO in your signature. Maybe I'll change mine to "Well, it wouldn't hurt anything if we..." or maybe "I didn't see anything about that in the THP". And there's always, "Okay boys, as soon as she's gone we'll...." The foresters I work with don't usually say NO. They're more inclined to saying things like "When do you think you'll finish?" Or "Try to get a little more side-hill with those skid trails". Another good one is "Tell that SOB in the red Kenworth to quit trying to eat a sandwhich, drink a cup of coffee, talk on the CB, and get around a double switchback all at the same time...He almost got me again today". I usually tell him that there's plenty of foresters but good truck drivers are hard to find.:)


See, we get no respect. :)
 
What kind of lift do they have? Doesn't look that steep. Is the hook climbing tail trees? Did you give him some good tails, and who marks the roads/corridors? Tree lengthing operations are tricky for scarring trees when the lift is not too high. You know all of this, I'll just listen. When I cut DNR sales, the loggers mark the corridors and the tail holds. You can usually find ribbons marking their roads going down the hill right through the best timber :) Are you guys banned from wagonwheels altogether yet? The State hates them around here.
 
What kind of lift do they have? Doesn't look that steep. Is the hook climbing tail trees? Did you give him some good tails, and who marks the roads/corridors? Tree lengthing operations are tricky for scarring trees when the lift is not too high. You know all of this, I'll just listen. When I cut DNR sales, the loggers mark the corridors and the tail holds. You can usually find ribbons marking their roads going down the hill right through the best timber :) Are you guys banned from wagonwheels altogether yet? The State hates them around here.

They had enough lift on the first corridor. The father, the guy in the pictures and his son are trying to log it all by themselves. The tail tree was not a good species, Silver Fir, but was all there was. So, they had to put a twister on the stump, which was also a Silver, or did they use an old stump? Can't remember. I walked through with them, and we all hunted up tail trees and stumps. I mark them and they cut them to derig. Then, they have rat trees
left in the unit, the contract requires rat trees to be left.

I mark out the corridor trees. The logger flags the locations. Our timber all looks the same so I can't figure out how they'd get the corridors spaced and laid out to go through the "best" timber.

To get lift with that little yarder, they'll set up on a couple of step landings. The problem with that, is how is the father going to get down off the yarder and down on the bottom part of the landing then back up the hill to they yarder fast. He thinks he'll lose weight. But he has a bad hip and had knee surgery last winter.

Yes, we do wagon wheel settings. It used to bother me but anymore I figure we are making elk habitat. The wagon wheel settings are hard for me to figure out how to follow though. I have to walk a bit to figure it out and then start marking. To get corridor width, I hold my arms out from the center and then add a foot. I do this on each side of the center. That gives around 12 feet. If it is downhill, I'll maybe go a little wider. Haven't heard any complaints from either the FS or the loggers, except when I've missed a tree.
Then I complain because I have to wade through the down trees. :cry:
 
They had enough lift on the first corridor. The father, the guy in the pictures and his son are trying to log it all by themselves. The tail tree was not a good species, Silver Fir, but was all there was. So, they had to put a twister on the stump, which was also a Silver, or did they use an old stump? Can't remember. I walked through with them, and we all hunted up tail trees and stumps. I mark them and they cut them to derig. Then, they have rat trees
left in the unit, the contract requires rat trees to be left.

I mark out the corridor trees. The logger flags the locations. Our timber all looks the same so I can't figure out how they'd get the corridors spaced and laid out to go through the "best" timber.

To get lift with that little yarder, they'll set up on a couple of step landings. The problem with that, is how is the father going to get down off the yarder and down on the bottom part of the landing then back up the hill to they yarder fast. He thinks he'll lose weight. But he has a bad hip and had knee surgery last winter.

Yes, we do wagon wheel settings. It used to bother me but anymore I figure we are making elk habitat. The wagon wheel settings are hard for me to figure out how to follow though. I have to walk a bit to figure it out and then start marking. To get corridor width, I hold my arms out from the center and then add a foot. I do this on each side of the center. That gives around 12 feet. If it is downhill, I'll maybe go a little wider. Haven't heard any complaints from either the FS or the loggers, except when I've missed a tree.
Then I complain because I have to wade through the down trees. :cry:

I can't recall, for sure, who marked the sets on our crew... But if I remember right, it was Danny the lead faller. We could hook 30' either side of the skyline on each set... And then prayed the fallers would lay out so we didn't have to hook in a big pile of pick-up-sticks!

What's 'wagon wheel settings'? I'm not familiar with the term?

BTW... I always enjoy your threads! :)
 
My first paint project! Here's a crude drawing of a wagon wheel setting. The landing is the blue blob and the corridors are the straight lines. Every corridor has to have the trees cut for a 12 foot or so wide clearing in a straight line. When they get close together near the landing, you'll end up with a small clearing around the landing. Doesn't look good to some people. It saves time in not having to move the yarder much or the other equipment. The preferred way is to have one or two corridors per landing, moving the equipment along on a road. That way you just have to have swing room for the shovel and maybe room for a small deck, along with the yarder.

With a wagon wheel, you can often use the guyline stumps more than once. On a move on down the road setting, you'll have to hunt for new guyline stumps, depending on how close the landings are to each other. We put in the contract that corridors need to be a certain distance apart. It varies a little with each contract, but we usually require that the yarder have enough line to pull 75 feet or more out from the carriage.

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My first paint project! Here's a crude drawing of a wagon wheel setting. The landing is the blue blob and the corridors are the straight lines. Every corridor has to have the trees cut for a 12 foot or so wide clearing in a straight line. When they get close together near the landing, you'll end up with a small clearing around the landing. Doesn't look good to some people. It saves time in not having to move the yarder much or the other equipment. The preferred way is to have one or two corridors per landing, moving the equipment along on a road. That way you just have to have swing room for the shovel and maybe room for a small deck, along with the yarder.

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Hmmmm... Interesting. I can't say we ever used that technique. If the set was short, we would mainline them usually, and not set up the skyline. Mainlining will wear your butt out, but with three guys taking turns, it isn't that bad I guess. I'll try and get some pictures of some sets' near the house here... I'm surrounded by them lol. Being that each set was 60' wide, it required a reset for the next corridor.

I can definitely see wagon-wheelin' as being a very useful technique.

We always pulled the sky by hand too (no haywire), the more I read, the more I'm starting to think that's a weird way of doing it? It's the way I learned though.

We had an old jammer rig logging up the road a few years ago... THAT was a cool old rig!! Darn thing had to be 90 or 100 years old! A huge larch was used as the spar. I think I took pictures, I'll have to dig through some boxes and try and find them.
 

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