I've been thinking about hiring another person to run my processor during the day, move the guy I have into the forwarder. They would work 4 to 1 and I would take over and work 1 til 9 , I would cut til for a while then take forwarder and get three or four trips with it and have 10 more loads a week with low overhead. Just wondered if anyone has done it this way? If I cut in winter til dark which is 5 then forward til 9 I can see to cut for a while it easier to forward in dark than cut. Any thoughts
If you can up production with minimal expense why not. Thats some pile of wood and fuel. I would love to see that rolly work, Ron @ woodland was trying to bait the hook real hard. 8)
Quote from: BargeMonkey on July 13, 2014, 04:43:40 PM
If you can up production with minimal expense why not. Thats some pile of wood and fuel. I would love to see that rolly work, Ron @ woodland was trying to bait the hook real hard. 8)
Come out to see it whenever you want to I'm working a little south of Buffalo.
I too am struggling with deciding how to get more productive hours on the machines. Generally the most productive times are when I'm on site. In your scenario there are 9 hrs a day when you may not be there which requires dedicated employees to keep things moving head.
We Tryed it once, my two guys cut and skid all day and I came in at 6Pm and skid buncher trees till 2 am
It takes a special breed of person to run ctl gear (especially harvesters) on shift work. The company I work for runs double shift ... dayshift is 5am to 4pm and night shift is 4pm to 2am ... we switch shifts every week ... the average guy on our crew has a 1.5 hr one way commute to work ... makes for long days and not many people are willing to do it anymore, of those that are I would venture that only about half of them are truly productive operators ... our crew has 8 machines running double shift ... a few operators barely cover fuel and wages, few more are average and the rest of us have to pick up the ... operators are hard to find, good/great ones are even harder ... lots of the good ones around here went west to make double the money we do here.
Quote from: Jamie_C on July 14, 2014, 12:41:12 PM
It takes a special breed of person to run ctl gear (especially harvesters) on shift work. The company I work for runs double shift ... dayshift is 5am to 4pm and night shift is 4pm to 2am ... we switch shifts every week ... the average guy on our crew has a 1.5 hr one way commute to work ... makes for long days and not many people are willing to do it anymore, of those that are I would venture that only about half of them are truly productive operators ... our crew has 8 machines running double shift ... a few operators barely cover fuel and wages, few more are average and the rest of us have to pick up the ... operators are hard to find, good/great ones are even harder ... lots of the good ones around here went west to make double the money we do here.
X2, we are losing a lot of guys to the iron mines. Any hack can run a skidder, put them in CTL equipment, especially a harvester, and they will destroy it in short order.