[Zachary Lowry]

Haha, yeah, sounds like you are in the same position I was a few years ago when I was looking at mine.

So first, I’d say if you are limiting yourself to an Polaris 800, you absolutely want the hydraulic 4 wheel drive on the trailer, so the second two on your list Id disqualify immediately unless you have a tractor. Y

And what size wood are you looking to cut, and what’s the main purpose of the operation? small pre-commercial improvements or full scale harvest? There’s a lot to consider in terms of carrying capacity and overall practicality depending on your purpose. For example, if it is mostly small 3-4 inch pieces you are cutting with occasional larger stems, you will be better off with a regular trailer with a winch instead of a crane, as most pieces can easily be hand loaded, and if the distance to the road is far, you may need a larger bunk

[Sean Wood]

I actually have a few tractors as well but we’re in mixed alpine area with quite a bit of heavy bush and trails. For the distances traveled to reasonable wood stands the ranger works better. I did recently pick up a 4×4 60hp tractor as well but some of the trails and areas are a bit rough for the tractor. I do have it as an available option as well though.

There’s a few factors in my area and as to my purpose. One thing I intend and may use to bother funding the equipment is for firewood for locals. I’m going to check in the area but I think I can probably lock down 60 cord+ per year in firewood sales which I could use to justify some equipment to make that less onerous. The secondary purpose would be retrieving wood for my own milling which would honestly be primarily for personal use. I’ve run the numbers on milling for money and there isn’t a good case for it with my set of circumstances. Milling for personal use though is very rewarding, both in enjoyment and in reduced cost of wood and in value adding to any wood based products, ie: selling cabinets and furniture and other wooden carpentry projects.

So its a partial business use and partial personal. I have winches and a log trailer already but without the boom arm for easier loading. I routinely skid wood out of the bush using my ranger already and then use a winch connected to a manual crane to load logs but it is a slower process and requires more manual labor than is enjoyable. I use a remote control winch on the crane and have to skid the logs up on the back of the trailer and forward, it works but its tedious and time consuming especially as the trailer gets full. While the trailer is only rated for around 2k I do tend to pull usually around 8x 10″-12″ diameter pine and fire usually around 12ft long. Running that through a board calculator is actually around 2800lbs and its pretty easily manageable.

As to the other factors. There aren’t alot of BIG trees in my area, there’s been a lot of logging and fires through the area over the years, the vast majority of decent wood here is in the 10-12″ wide category, there are some bigger trees to be found but not in any large quantity. Specifically some of my land was logged around 15yrs ago so big trees are in harder to access areas leaving smaller stuff more accessible.

[Zachary Lowry]

Then one of the other things to consider is the cycle time between loads. The smaller trailer you posted has a reduced carrying capacity, so you move less wood per productive machine hour at the benefit of it being lighter and more maneuverable for the machine.

Im not sure if you’ve seen it, but this is a video I made on some of my revelations with this set up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0XEz3fS46E

Basically, The forwarding trailers really shine when it comes to moving relatively large amounts of cut to length wood along a more or less straight path, but they lack maneuverability in the woods itself, so my solution was to skid logs to the edge of the main trail and use the trailer to then forward trailside wood to the road. In this setup, every piece of equipment is working within its realm of competency. However, then the biggest draw of the forwarding trailer is in its throughput and thus hauling capacity instead of its small scale maneuverability.

So honestly, Id recommend planning on a beefier, higher volume, more hp setup so you can still get the best of both worlds.

[Sean Wood]

Zach,

Yea I’m leaning towards a bit of a bigger unit with the hydraulic assist, I’ve been checking into importing a unit from China, an upgraded version of the one unit I posted, direct from supplier its quite a bit cheaper as well and I’ve gotten a quote on it from them now for shipping to Vancouver.

I am overall partial to equipment that is just large enough for a comfort level for the job for a single person. Primarily I work alone or with small assistance from wife and kids. Most people around here are pretty independent minded and finding someone to work with that coordinates well with you can be a challenge and often doesn’t necessarily have returns.

Often the benefit of optimal equipment is to reduce the complication of coordination with multiple workers, in a labor poor but technology rich world, these tools provide us with the ability to leverage our individual work patterns in a most optimal sense.

As for sizing though, I have a neighbor with a hitachi 250 excavator that he does quite a bit of clearing and full scale logging with. Its around $800 to fill his fuel tank and if he’s going full on with work he’ll empty that out in a day and a half of work or sooner, so he really has to budget the jobs that he does. Even doing smaller jobs has a large ratio of expense in operating a larger machine, while a smaller machine will take longer for the job, if you have a machine of sufficient size, it can be significantly cheaper to operate at the expense of time for the job. I find if you average the small and larger jobs, unless you have pretty large scale work to do for an extended period of time, there tends to be more value and efficiency in a machine thats just large enough for the jobs you most often do.

As our woods are reasonably thick here, most of the work I will be doing will be off primary trails or will require equipment use to create trails. I’d prefer to keep my trails nominally sized, you mentioned this in one of your videos in terms of impact on the forest overall and that resonated with me.

To that end I am still targeting a trailer of a smaller size, with our hills here (just shy of being mountains) we have some decent grades coming up out of our valley and I don’t want to overload myself with too much volume. I intend to find an optimal balance between time and labor and overall expense for a single person operation, with a mind more on work/life balance and sustainable practices (in terms of stress, time and labor invested).

While a larger trailer offers greater capacity, I don’t intend to harvest deeply. Another factor behind that is that large scale logging in Canada is subject to state stumpage fees, even if the trees are your own on your own land. This is all managed through the commercial sales and mill system and is additionally subject to logging taxes in addition to stumpage rates on trees on your own land. I believe the logic is that the crown owns all the trees regardless of private property. For personal clearing and using your own wood on your own mill and selling privately milled wood or products produced from privately milled wood you work around the additional bureaucracy and paperwork required if you go larger scale and commercial.

This is my reasoning behind keeping a smaller scale of work and economy. In my experience, with taxes and bureaucracy in general, small scale tends to be the most efficient, the cheapest and the least cost of paperwork. As a family we’ve always focused on reducing overheads, needs and debt, this has allowed us to do substantially more with less and I carry that principle through with equipment as well as it seems more of a universally applicable principle.

[Sean Wood]

Zach,

I just re-watched your video discussing the forestry trailer issues.

I’m interested in your take on my situation in regards to your mentioned issues. I have areas where I would be harvesting say 1-2 miles away from anywhere I’d be doing processing, milling, cutting for firewood etc. Most of that travel would be on narrower decommissioned logging roads, not suitable for a full sized truck, alright for a smaller tractor and typically used for utvs or atvs, with a decent grade hills.

Typically what I have done is used utv’s to skid logs out from the bush to the main trails and loaded them on a trailer and taken a larger load down. My thought process for the forestry trailer is mitigating the labor behind maneuvering the large logs onto a trailer using a winch/strap system which is fairly slow and cumbersome and still requires some heavy lifting. In addition to that is having the capability to transport a reasonable amount per trip, often say 8-10 cut to length 10-12′ logs of usually 10-14″ diameter.

Part of my travel does sometimes travel along public gravel roads for a 1/2 mile stretch so just skidding logs isn’t always an option. For some trails I’m only crossing a public gravel road but I have a different set of areas I’d be doing harvesting so there’s some variability there.

I’m also not doing commercial logging, its for land maintenance, milling (mostly for personal use) and firewood (for both personal and sale). The firewood is a large factor as I would only bother with the trailer in the event I can secure enough business from locals to finance the trailer, so it would be the source of value/revenue for the trailer.

Does my logic seem to support the purchase of the forestry trailer? Do you have any suggestions or alternatives that you would advise or recommend? I like to take a lot of input or ideas and process them before determining a course of action. To often it can seem like the ‘shiny I must have it’ rather than consistent logic that motivates a purchase. I think I’ve convinced myself of the value but I’m at the stage now where I need to take a step back and take some feedback and decide if the logic is sound or if I’m missing something.

Your video you covered, seemed to imply that overall you felt the trailer was a misstep or more of a learning lesson than an ideal piece of equipment. You implied the skidding cone was a good replacement (I have one as well). Is that because you do have nearby accessible road access that you would be having logs loaded commercially thus not needing longer distance transportation? For your own milling purposes, do you find that you are centralized enough on/with your land that its as or more time efficient to just skid logs with the tractor rather than the difficulty of maneuvering a trailer?

So I guess its a question of, do you see the trailer as not suiting your specific land conditions that make it unnecessary due to being a more centralized setup and if you had longer distances or a larger piece of land, do you think the trailer would have a greater use/value?

[Zachary Lowry]

Yeah, actually I think that is a perfect use for a forestry trailer, however, I would reconsider the exact strategy for using it.

I’d put it like this: The forestry trailer is either for harvesting or transport/long distance forwarding, but not both.

The first, smaller trailer you posted with hydraulic drive is great for a small machine and can be used in the woods, but it is probably too small to carry wood long distances, especially past 1/2 mile. However, a larger machine would be too big to use on a harvest trail and require large equipment, but would be great for longer distances.

For my land, what Ive decided was that its best to have longer main trails for distance hauls and then use a typical ground-skid to bring logs short distances to the edge of those trails. Kind of like in the (bad) diagram I scratched together here. If you use something like a skid cone and choker cable on an ATV, it can be super efficient and use every machine to its greatest competency.

It’s not always ideal to still have to pull each log manually, but it is also a relatively inefficient process going into the woods with the crane, as I learned.

[Jacob]

I’ve looked at these trailers as an alternative to bigger equipment with larger footprint/larger impact but they just don’t make sense to me from a financial standpoint. I caveat this with, if you are doing it for fun, hard to go wrong. Also, they are cool.

If we just consider pine and what a 400 lb pine log looks like (the limit of the machine) if I cut those logs into their most valuable form of lumber I get a single 12 ft 6×6 (if I’m lucky). You can load 8 of them on to the trailer. Lets assume in a single day, you can take down the requisite trees, get them cut, loaded, hauled out, on the mill, and turned into lumber in a single day. If we say each piece of lumber is worth 50 bucks, you made 400 dollars gross for a day of HARD labor. 400 dollars gross with a 7k trailer, 7k atv, 15k sawmill, and 8 hours of HARD labor.

I think as has been mentioned elsewhere and as was maybe mentioned in a video that @silvicultural made, a small tractor (could be found for that same 14k) and appropriate attachment is a better solution so you can pull logs that yield higher value products. These trailers just don’t have the power to pick up logs that make real money.

Edit: I also considered horses as a novel alternative

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 5 days ago by  Jacob Chidester.

[Sean Wood]

The trailers are definitely very specifically useful. For a full scale logging operation yea, I don’t see there being a big purpose in them, they’re pretty exclusively useful I think if you’re planning on a multi-tier personal process. By that I mean you harvest your own stuff, then process your own stuff, then use your own stuff.

A 400lb pine 12′ long is usually a 10″ – 12″ butt diameter log. I’ll get 2x 2x6x12 and a 6x6x12 out of that for myself, or 6x 2x6x12. For me in our canadian monopoly money thats $80 in lumber for the one 12′ log. When I go up with the trailer it takes me about 2hrs to load up 8 of those, so for me thats a $640 day, and I use winches for everything in the bush, I unhook the trailer and skid out logs to the main trail after cutting them up in the bush, then once they’re on the road I use the crane and winch to load them on the trailer. It isn’t a ton of tough work but a grapple would make it much less.

Back at home, I use a mini excavator with thumb to unload and stack things on the log deck, once its on the log deck I can mill it up pretty fast and its pretty light labor. I clock in around 168bf/hr pretty consistently for the finishes stacked lumber, not just cutting to cants, so I could basically load up and polish off the trailer in about 6-7hrs on my own.

I’ll admit I’m pretty lazy though and would probably go get the wood and stack it one day and call it at about 4hrs taking it easy and mill it the 2nd day, so only about $320/day.

But I’m also a cheap bastard, so the mill was $7k, current trailer was $3k and the ranger was $6k. But I’ve had those all for years now and they’ve paid themselves off a few times over in work done, not just for lumber but hauling gravel and rock for projects, plowing snow, multiple building projects, doing projects for neighbors etc.

The new investment I’m considering is just to make the workload easier for more consistently harvesting a bit of a larger volume, most of it would be for firewood for my local community.

[Jacob]

Firewood would be one product I see this type of trailer being valuable in the production chain of. I just hadn’t considered it much as I live in a climate where firewood really isn’t a major consideration

[Nathan Mooney]

I also was thinking about that as well. Since I do have a small Kubota MX 6000, with the grapple attachment in the front and a Norse 350 logging wench in the back, I am opting to go with a gooseneck trailer Deckover that can handle both my tractor for transporting, a doubles as a logging trailer for hauling decent loads of logs. I will let you know how it does once I make the purchase this week and put it to use. The tractor though has been wonderful in lifting and moving full sized logs (up to a point) because I only use it for intermediate thinning operations and TSI work. I don’t think I would be able to lift the logs that are usually pulled out of a mature forest for final harvest.

[Sean Wood]

Yea firewood is a pretty big thing where I am, we usually get a spell of -50c (-58f) here through winter and generally its around -15c (5f) here through the winter, from late october through until generally the end of march. A local neighbor was doing firewood for most people here but he just retired so the demand has opened up.

The forestry trailer would be paying for itself through the firewood hauling and processing for sure and secondary as handy for milling.

I’m definitely considering what Zach mentioned with the hydraulic assist though, sort of covers your bases for hills and getting stuck with larger loads.

As for larger trailers for me, I have a 20′ flat deck for hauling logs from neighbors and hauling machines around when need be, it would double as a firewood hauler as well. No way I’m getting that thing up in the bush here though.

So I’m wondering if anyone else has looked around and has any recommendations on other places to check for forestry trailers?

[Nathan Mooney]

So an update on my own trailer purchase. I just ended up getting a 21K tri-axle 30′ Deckover with Dove-tail ramps. Its a work horse that can double for log hauling and to carry my tractor from property to property. With the pocket stakes I am planning to have someone build me some stakes to use so I can haul larger loads. Now I am only limited by my tractor’s lift capacity (safely at a height with heavy logs). It was a year 2000 trailer, but is still in good condition, (deck needs to be replaced soon). That being said, I was glad that I got one that was beat up and 20 years old because not more than two hours after I purchased it and got it home to load, the guy running the machine to offload the logs at the mill ran the forks right into my boards and broke three of them lol. Little tip from my experience, it helps to through some 2-3″ runners across the deck before putting the logs on so they can see the gap for the forks to fit under the logs without tearing up your trailer. Will post photos soon.

[Jacob]

Can’t figure out how to “like” but I’ll second this. Runners to create a gap for forks is big important.

[Nathan Mooney]

I don’t think there is the option to like a particular comment yet, only the main post in some of the topics

I’ve seen.

• This reply was modified 1 week ago by  Nathan Mooney. Reason: accuracy of statement

[Nathan Mooney]

I want to correct this. I did just find that you can like a comment on the main part of the group page, in the “Feed” tab I think, but the option is not present when looking at the post through the discussion thread (if I am labeling them correctly). Might be something that Zack can look into adding if he feels there would be a benefit to it.

• This reply was modified 1 week ago by  Nathan Mooney.