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Feller Buncher costs?

Started by Old Greenhorn, April 09, 2021, 07:13:02 AM

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nativewolf

Quote from: Firewoodjoe on April 10, 2021, 07:13:33 AM
I can't see where the timber will pay for anything. At least a very small amount. Which sounds like you guys know that. I wouldn't bother cutting it at all. I'd hire a mulcher head type cutter and just mow everything then be done. Looks nice and no work involved just money. Let the bugs have it.
My thoughts too
Liking Walnut

Wudman

Quote from: nativewolf on April 10, 2021, 12:14:05 PM
Quote from: Firewoodjoe on April 10, 2021, 07:13:33 AM
I can't see where the timber will pay for anything. At least a very small amount. Which sounds like you guys know that. I wouldn't bother cutting it at all. I'd hire a mulcher head type cutter and just mow everything then be done. Looks nice and no work involved just money. Let the bugs have it.
My thoughts too
You would probably need to move some mulch.  With heavy stocking on site, there will be a foot of mulch on the ground.  I think it would serve to suppress the desired regeneration.  It will alter nutrient availability and potentially become a quagmire as it breaks down.  With all of the rain over the last few years, we have struggled with skid rows in the second thinning operations.  You distribute slash back down them in the first thin to minimize compaction and return some nutrients.  Coming back in round two and it functioned as a sponge.


Wudman
  
"You may tear down statues and burn buildings but you can't kill the spirit of patriots and when they've had enough this madness will end."
Charlie Daniels
July 4, 2020 (2 days before his death)

mike_belben

So the guy is brand new at it and wants over $300/hr to run his buncher?  


I think you know why its parked. 
Praise The Lord

Skeans1

Quote from: mike_belben on April 10, 2021, 01:56:52 PM
So the guy is brand new at it and wants over $300/hr to run his buncher?  


I think you know why its parked.
300 for a single day isn't out of line the moving cost alone would eat any profit, plus you're asking for a specific job that's not a clear cut. Most of the rates you've seen are clear cut rates which is cheaper.

mike_belben

Is this a tracked or wheeled buncher ogh?
Praise The Lord

Old Greenhorn

Tracked, but it is not a good fit for the job. Skeans1, not sure where 300 a day came from. He wants $3,000/day.
Tom Lindtveit, Woodsman Forest Products
Oscar 328 Band Mill, Husky 350, 450, 562, & 372 (Clone), Mule 3010, and too many hand tools. :) Retired and trying to make a living to stay that way. NYLT Certified.
OK, maybe I'm the woodcutter now.
I work with wood, There is a rumor I might be a woodworker.

SwampDonkey

Quote from: Old Greenhorn on April 10, 2021, 05:01:35 PM
Tracked, but it is not a good fit for the job. Skeans1, not sure where 300 a day came from. He wants $3,000/day.
Per day? He's not building roads and not paying stumpage or trucking. :D

On the other hand, there's going to come a point where there isn't enough production to even buy equipment. They want crazy money for iron these days.
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

Old Greenhorn

Well, here is the way I look at it: It's his equipment and he decides what his rate needs to be. If I find that way out of line I am not going to tell him how to run his business or what he should charge, that's not my place and it is no way to continue a relationship. Its his business. He stated a cost and I don't think that's in line with the job, but it doesn't matter what I think, it's HIS equipment. But I can just say 'no thank you' and move on. Maybe there will be a different job down the line that fits better. 
 Now here is what I do think, and keep it to myself.  I don't see this job running from big job to big job. I know he would have to transport it only about 10 miles to get on the site, 15 tops depending on where it sits now. Its a 30 ton machine, so the move is not to be ignored. When a machine is not working and a job comes along that will pay transport, the operator, fuel, and show a little profit for the day, that should be considered. But I think this fella, as much as I like him, has a habit of asking top dollar plus some, just to see if he can get it, then he will come down after a lot of talking dickering and walking the job and 'working something out'. I don't do that. I ask for your quote, if I can pay the price I pay it, if not, I figure something else out. No harm, no foul. Its just business.
 But the bottom line is that this FB is just too much machine for this job even though it would make quick work of it. There are logistics involved that just make it a non-starter. That shear, on the other hand....
Tom Lindtveit, Woodsman Forest Products
Oscar 328 Band Mill, Husky 350, 450, 562, & 372 (Clone), Mule 3010, and too many hand tools. :) Retired and trying to make a living to stay that way. NYLT Certified.
OK, maybe I'm the woodcutter now.
I work with wood, There is a rumor I might be a woodworker.

Southside

I have been known to give a "I don't want this job" price, and sometimes they still pay. 
Franklin buncher and skidder
JD Processor
Woodmizer LT Super 70 and LT35 sawmill, KD250 kiln, BMS 250 sharpener and setter
Riehl Edger
Woodmaster 725 and 4000 planner and moulder
Enough cows to ensure there is no spare time.
White Oak Meadows

Firewoodjoe

Around here it's $130 per hour just to haul it. That's round trip loaded and empty. Then you have to pay again to get it home/next job. It will burn 40-50 gallons of fuel. Then up keep and operator. I've made over $1,000 hand cutting for hire one day. 3,000 is plenty but I do t think it's way out of line.  

Skeans1

Quote from: Old Greenhorn on April 10, 2021, 05:01:35 PM
Tracked, but it is not a good fit for the job. Skeans1, not sure where 300 a day came from. He wants $3,000/day.
At 300 per hour for a day with hauling costs you might break even.

treemuncher

I've owned a tracked skid steer with an accumulating tree shear, I have 2 other shears for my excavators and I have several mulchers on rubber and tracks. I do not have any experience with a hot saw.

From what I've read about this job, about 4 acres of selective thinning, I would push a customer to a mulcher for this job. Shears are painfully slow for my fast paced work habits and only used when I have safety issues. Fences, roadsides and other safety concerns sometimes require shear work to get the job done safely. An accumulator will speed up the process but all shears are slow production, grabbing each ...individual ..tree.....one.....at....a.......time. What a snooze fest that crap is for my caffeine agitated lifestyle. A hot saw might be better but I don't have valid input on one of those.

If you are mostly clearing hemlocks and pines in decent conditions, sharp knives will offer the fastest output. If you don't need a very clean grind, that will keep the bits out of the soil and allow the fastest possible job. Selective mulching should be easy for any decent operator - I do it all of the time.

Worries about too much mulch can be countered by a rougher finish job to slow the wet decay or chemical additions to speed up break down. This will also allow soft blades to be used (knife type) as there will be no need to get to dirt/rock level. Fecon's Samuri knives are my favorite when I have clean, silt loam cutting conditions - El Rapido! 

Depending on the density and size of the trees to be knocked out, 150 hp machine maybe 1-3 days or 300+ hp machine in a day. It likely won't be as cheap as a feller buncher but everything will be done in one go with a mulcher. No piles, no tops, no stumps - just a clean finish product that will allow your save trees to get going. You will have full access to the land without any brush piles cluttering up the area.

Just my $0.02  YMMV
TreeMuncher.com  Where only the chosen remain standing

PJS

Hate dragging up an old thread, but for those of you with tracked feller bunchers, what would your average daily cost to operate be? 

I am not looking to make money, I am wondering if it is more economical for me to purchase an older machine and do the 300 acre selective cut for pasture/wildlife that we want done on our property over the next two years. My chainsaw felling skills are mediocre at best and the larger trees are way above my skill level and I'm smart enough to admit it.

Using the $3k/day figure from above, for arguments sake 60 perfect days to select cut (5acres/day), that's $180k without getting the wood out of the bush. 

Basically, 
1.fell with the machine
2.limb by hand
3.drag out tree length. 
4. Mulch stumps/slash
5. Trade feller buncher for excavator for rock removal and pond building.
6. Fence and feed hay to animals and eventually grow grass. 

There is a possibility I could lease a newer machine for two years to hammer this out, I am "in between jobs" and leasing may have some tax advantages over purchasing. Could get a part time job to cover the monthly payment even. It also gives me a new skill should I have to go find employment. 

After reading the horror stories in that other thread, I don't want to hire someone to cut it and be on their timeframe, nor highgraded. I want most of the trees for my neighbours mill for lumber for projects on the farm, hardwoods will be burnt, anything extra I can always sell to the local mills to help cover expenses. 

Getting the wood out of the bush isn't a problem, there's 6 cable skidders that can get here without touching a road, can hire on a hourly rate as needed to drag them out. Obviously not as economical as a grapple but will get the job done. 

I see older feller bunchers running from $40-100k, "working every day", but I haven't the slightest idea what it costs to run one per hour. Obviously I am aware large unexpected repairs lay waiting in the shadows at all times, but let's pretend I will have good luck LOL 

Firewoodjoe

300 acres? Sounds like your pretty green? Risking spending thousands up front plus thousands of repairs? 

Just get multiple quotes. And have it done. Move on. Around here guys will clear and stump it to a field for trade of the timber. This process isn't cheap or easy. 

brianJ

Sounds like a great excuse to get a feller buncher and you will get a lot of satisfaction in the progress you make. 8)

Log-it-up

What do you have for a skidder 
And you don't get much of a buncher for a 100k I wouldn't be surprised if you put at least another 30k into by the you finished the the 300 acres 
Are there company's near you that would hire our there buncher with a good operator they can lay down some timber in a short amount of time 
I would invest the money in a good excavator to start with then you can build your skid rds if necessary and stack wood on the landing and many more uses 


Riwaka

Sounds a bit strange to me. If a person is a feller buncher operator that person usually has a forest stretching out to the horizon in which to use and make the feller buncher financially viable.

What is the current forest like junk and unrecoverable or able to be revived?

It is understandable that one would want to level a forest rather than participate in aggregated 5000K acre forest parcels with multiple owners/ entities for the carbon schemes. 

https://www.eomf.on.ca/media/k2/attachments/Carbon_Offsets_for_Community_Forests_2022v.7.pdf

Need a well-paying part-time job to cover the training cost of being a forest machine operator.

cdn$31400 for 5 weeks for one course.

https://www.obrientraining.com/forestry

Two options I can quickly think of.

1) employ 2 qualified arborists to do some initial selective felling and upskill/ train the landowner on a saw. Easy log extraction by skidder and crane truck to take logs to neighbours mill.

2) either keep going at slow pace and keep forest as selective forest for logs and firewood. (and go and lease/buy established (neglected or better?) farmland leveraged against increased? value of the forest)

3) Roadbuilder forest excavator (forestry rated cab with margard screen, heavy duty undercarriage etc) - with bar saw felling head and able to be swapped to bucket/ thumb, stump ripper etc.
     Hire a forwarder for less damage to ground.
     Roadbuilder and bar saw felling head can load non-crane log trucks to give more transport options.
In sand soil forests converted to farms, it was quicker to dig / fell the trees intact than cut and leave the stump for mulching. 
Felling grapple head (on excavator conversion) loading truck
Satco 420 Felling Grapple - loading a truck - YouTube







BargeMonkey

 Where exactly are you from ? What type of ground and how big is
the wood ? My opinion varies on the subject of well used iron because that's all I could ever afford, bought my first slasher off the poverty back row at Milton and cut a PILE of wood with it after some minor repairs, now Ive got 3 of them, my first buncher and stroker where repo machines I bought for 20% on the dollar, sold the buncher, made 6k and kept the delimber for free, I only got 10yrs use out of it, transplanted the engine into an 892D excavator I bought cheap. 


 
13k ☝️, 1k to truck it from PA, pack 1 cyl, have like 22k in a cheap shovel that will still cut wood if I was desperate. 


 
38k cash buys that ☝️. Friend of mine looked at it the other day, he knows he's going to put 20k+ into it, 753J, not completely spanked and came out of Maine.
 There's ALOT of decent iron around that isn't 100-300k used. How mechanically inclined are you ? Hours don't scare me if the stuff has had decent maintenance, certain models you wanna watch, certain heads. I recently passed up a low hour "engine down" Timbco that was in mint shape for 10k bucks in OH, I'm talking go to the woods nice shape, they walked it off the trailer at the scrap yard, plucked the engine out and it went into the furnace. There is a CLEAN 501HD and Rottne Rapid 6 wheeler in Maine right now that just came up for sale on marketplace, I bet 130k buys the pair, that's tracks, tools and parts included if your looking to go the CTL route, I'm talking go to the woods shape.

PJS

 ??? well I went to post and I timed out and it disappeared into the interwebs lol Here goes number 2

I suppose my initial question should have been, of the $300/hour rate, what is the financial breakdown? What is fuel? what's profit? what's insurance? what is the operators wage? what is maintenance?

Joe, I figured that would be the typical response and I will seek quotes but I won't be trading the timber for the work which means I am coughing up cash one way or another. Our neighbor has his mill parked on our land and I'll get him to turn a lot of it into lumber for projects I have around the farm or firewood to heat the house.

I also don't want it stumped as our soil is shallow and bedrock is not far underneath. Clear it, mulch whatever remains as low as possible, start feeding hay and adding manure and over the next decade or two we will have some decent soil built up in the pasture. One of our clients has a mulching business so I'll hire that out to them instead of buying another machine. 

I don't have a skidder. My neighbors all have skidders, there's 6 off the top of my head and probably a few more I don't know about. Hired at an hourly rate, its one less machine for me to worry about, and if I made it a loop, I could get 2 running at a time. I have a tractor and a skidsteer to deal with the logs once they're out.

From what I've understood from talking to the few guys I know around here that own/work on/for machines/crews, they are all under contract or sub contract for a mill or whoever and kept working in good wood which leaves me subject to their availability IF they are even willing to consider it.

Barge, in Ontario, about 2 hours west of Ottawa. Would be a day drive to most border crossings. We are in hills with lots of rocks, there will be some steep places a machine wont be able to touch, but there are flat plateaus that can be cleared for great pasture. Basically my thoughts are a TSI, select, clear cut combo depending on the area. Some will be hammered clear, some thinned of the ugly/worst to leave the best for the future and others left as shade/silvopasture for the livestock/wildlife habitat. 

The wood is mixed hard and softwood, mostly red/white pine, spruce, balsam, tamarack, birch, beech(lots dying), maple, poplar. There is a small portion that was touched back in the 80s but a lot has never been touched, so it varies from areas of dense 2-3" trees that need to be mulched, 6"-20" spruce/balsam/tamarack, to some nice stands of red/white pine that are straight as an arrow and 20-30"+ and 60-80', there are maples that I can't get my arms across at chest height and I wont bother touching till mother nature takes them down. To top it all off there are tons of standing dead and fallen over  trees everywhere and if its going to be me out there working, I would prefer some steel around me. 

Joe is right, I am green, I wouldn't know what to look for if I wanted to buy a machine which is where I get concerned that my inexperience will sink me into a deep hole. I would say that I am inclined but not mechanically experienced. I don't lack common sense nor afraid of learning and a challenge. I have worked on overhead cranes/steel bandsaws, tore the skidsteer half apart to replace the starter, re- wired my older tractor, basic stuff. If I am really stumped on a problem I call my neighbor with the mill who we've nicknamed Mr. Fix it, he instructs I follow listen and absorb the information. He's probably forgot more than I have learned so I have that ace in my back pocket. 

Assuming I am quoted somewhere around that $180k mark to do the work from someone else, it sounds like my other two options are

1) buy the feller buncher, lets say its 65k to get into the bush with one, hire out the skidder work hourly to get the trees out of the bush ($1000/day x 60days = $60k) leaving about a $55k budget for covering fuel/maintenance expenses (Assuming I never sell a stick of wood)

2) Go the CTL route with machines like you've mentioned and be self sufficient at $130k and $50k for fuel/maintenance expenses (again assuming I never sell a stick of wood)

I can see pros and cons to both avenues, one I am reliant on others to be available, the other I have two machines that could break down. CTL seems like it has more and smaller moving parts to bugger up with all the rollers on the head, bent bars/chains and a crane/boom on a forwarder. There would be a learning curve either way, slow and steady is my go to routine when I climb into a new machine, is one more rookie friendly than the other?

I think this post is longer than the first one I wrote... sorry folks!! :D 8)

barbender

 I see rubber tire bunchers come up fairly cheap. You can get a deal even on track machines if you know what you're looking for. 


 Here's part of the problem I see- you get the cash or financing for the initial purchase. Being you're not generating an income with it, how are you going to pay for the big ticket repairs that inevitably happen, especially if you can't afford it?

 You are going to generate a LOT of timber working 300 acres, even if you are just making small clearings. I cut our 10 acres and got around 200 cords, and it wasn't a clear cut by any means. How much are you planning on ending up with?
Too many irons in the fire

Dom

Have you considered walking the woods with a Forester to determine what's really in there and simply marking the trees you want removed?

I think Ontario has a service through the wood marketing board, they do in NB.

Probably something to consider before such a expensive purchase. 

You have a good idea what you want do to, but it's good to have an external set of eyes on a project like this.


Firewoodjoe

FYI next time you know your doing a long post. Double click and copy it every so often. That way when it times out you have 1/2 or 3/4 you can paste. Been there done that. 

I see no reason to not at least walk it with a forester. There usually free to show up and walk. Otherwise sounds like you pretty sure you can make it work. Buy one and send it. Have fun. Good luck. 

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