Been improving and fine tuning my close quarters logging activities, and your book, a copy of which I'd obtained from Scott Baker, sure didn't hurt!!
We recently got 2900 board feet from 6 firs, all in a 25 by 150 foot space, houses, trees, and driveway on each side, pwr lines and trees on one end, nice shed and plants at or near the other. Had my stumper sub grind three, so I could drop the sticks from the biggest, which touched and overhung the house. (Big wind on that one too, right toward the house, groan. Had to keep setting reidrect above my head as far out on a limb as I could reach, to keep em to hang better. Guess we could have speed lined, oh well.)For the back tree,we used our portable to grind a stump in the way, then cut pies out of some wood, set them by the fence,so the 46 foot, 21 inch top diameter last stick would land and be deflected away from the fence. She dropped right onto the concrete patio, saving the customer some labor busting it up, and the tip made it exactly on target, five feet from the house corner. My 3120 is in canada getting massaged to ~12 hp, so my 36 inch bar 066 wouldnt go all the way through, and the too close fence precluded easy hinge setup. If I had cut out too much of the fence side of the hinge, it probably would have moved toward my customer's house, but not hit it. The other way would have demolished the neighbor's. As it was, I held about a inch too much on that side, it could have been bad!! Said a big phew when she eased over!! Linemen were part of the audience, as they had just arrived to rehook the service. On that same tree, the wind had helped me sail a 30 foot top over a big rhodo. Then we pulled a 21 foot stick, from ~65 feet up. I pushed, they pulled, it sailed clear, but I should have had a butt (as well as tip) line and let them pull, while I held the butt to speed up the flip rate. It landed nose down, and JUST tipped over. Back would have probably caught the nice shed. Too close!! Then, we had to fwood the next ~18 feet, as, if i'd moved its drop toward the house and away from the shed, it well could have flipped over and caught the house, about 50 feet away. Very unlikely, but not a chance I was going to take. Not for a domestic knotty log worth 50-75 bucks!!
After the stumps were out, we got my puny Toyota to pull some sticks, then the tree truck got the rest, so the self loader had a reasonable log deck. Furthest we've ever skidded using chains and the self loader is 100 feet. On that one, we had to use a block and back pull it out of a stuck spot with the dubble braid. But that was back when we were getting max 1260 per mbf for fir. now its 630, and the grade given is lousy! Market is so bad, it's better to cut 16-26's as a reasonable good log brings $500 per, with lots more scale.
[ March 29, 2002: Message edited by: Roger Barnett ]
