[Sean Wood]

If you don’t have a mill yourself and aren’t necessarily planning on getting one, you might want to check and target anyone in the area advertising milling. They’d probably be prime targets for selling raw logs to, and from personal experience, being able to get your hands on some nice hardwoods definitely opens up their options to advertise and sell some quality woods, and they may already have clients asking for some specialty wood.

[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?

[Sean Wood]

I’ve seen and heard that smaller sized tracked dozers can work pretty well for winter harvesting. I’m looking at an old Oliver oc-3 in my area for similar purposes, they’re small, around 25hp, usually 6ft ish wide on the outer tracks for an example. Its a small enough unit that they’re not overly invasive or damaging, similar to what you’re going to be doing with a tractor.

Also another option would be a front (or even rear) mounted snowblower, its not like you need to clear snow to ground level so if you keep it positioned up off the ground a ways to avoid debris you should be able to clear workable paths.

[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?

[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]

Kip,

Yea I have a minimum size for people here of 14″ to be worth milling. I do smaller myself just for personal use because I have more time than money for that sort of thing, but its not worth doing anything smaller.

The redwood sounds wonderful, I have wood envy haha. It gets cold enough where we are that sometimes it will even kill cedar so we don’t have very much cedar here and its almost all exclusively pine and fir. Its fine for cheap construction wood and crafts but I really wish I had more species here for variety and some hardwoods for certain projects.

[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.

[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.