I've got 60 acres in Breckenridge Colorado - about 30% of the trees (lodgepole pine) are dead due to the colorado beatle. The property is somewhat steep in areas & I cant seem to figure out the most efficient & safest way to retreive logs from the woods. Most of where i need to go to is accessible by a driveway which is a mile long and weaves through the property, so I do have some options.
Here's what I've got:
Cat 287B with a grapple
Ford f-150
JD gator on tracks & winch
ATV tracks/gator
In the past I''ve just used the gator or truck to pull them out of the woods and up the driveway. Looking for options. Thinking either a winch for the truck, maybe a trailer with a winch rigged to it, maybe a skidder for the atv/gator, but wasn't sure how efficient that is.
Thanks for any help.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7S7OlscZMQ
Hook that behind your ATV / pickup / tractor etc and you can haul logs as far as needed. No matter what you are dragging with, you can drag more, further, and faster if it's suspended under an arch. There are also all sorts of home brew versions that people have made.
Use your winch or Cat to retrieve logs from the steeper spots, dragging them to some place flatter, hook them to the arch and haul them home.
Ian
How steep is the slope? If you have a winch, and a couple snatch blocks, with some cable rigging and hand winches, you could rig up a smallish yarding operation, would just have to get creative with the haulback line, or you could always walk the line back, since you aren't really going after production like a big logging show.
Zak
A tractor with a Farmi winch (or similar) with remote control.
Am assuming that you cannot get the gator or ATV close to the log. And assuming you have steep slopes that these machines don't traverse well enough.
Farmi or comp. and mount to the skid steer.
All of the above are good ideas, Logrite has many of the items you may need such as rigging,winching,arches and other support equipment.
The Porta-Winch and releasing snatch blocks can help a lot and if your cat 287B can punch a few minimal haul roads on the slopes you can skid everything you need to your landing or arch if its not to steep, if possible cut your haul roads just upslope of a nice row of the lodgepoles and use them for a railing to help limb and keep the logs on the haul road during your yarding operation then remove the the skinned up trees last.
Not sure I have a solution but I'll give some observations from experience that may save you some broken gear....
1) A winch on a truck is NOT a skidder winch. Winch logs to the truck all you want but unhook from winch line once you get it to the truck and secure it to the truck with whatever.... just don't let it hooked to the winch. Even a 15K# warn will not tolerate being used as a skidder winch for long.
2) If your Cat 287 has tracks and you are running on sloped terrain (or even flat for that matter) that kind of load being pulled in reverse is a sure fire way to throw a track since it puts a crazy amount of strain on the track in the wrong direction and when you reverse with a load you push all the track slack to the rear idlers. HAve plans made ahead of time on how you are going to reset a track where you can't get a truck to. I have done it in the past and it's a real pain and that is when it goes good.