Grapple trucks are great for many operations. Many companies run them around here, despite high dumping prices and our dump sites being sloping mud pits. They make a lot of sense for companies that focus on bucket access. Many places you can get a boom truck, you can get a grapple truck in, or a big skidder to move short massive piles. If you are sending in a lift to nibble down lots of material very quickly and get out, they make a lot of sense. If you are cutting or rigging large/long pieces (as climbers tend to working from the inside of the tree at attachment points to structure) keeping the pieces long and maneuvering them to be processed is more productive, especially if feeding the chipper is continuous. It skips an additional manned process of loading. Our chipper has a remote that the mini loader operator can use to control the throttle and operation.
Chips are so much easier to get rid of. We even sell some.
I haven’t worked with a grapple truck enough to say what is better for brush capacity. If I had to guess, our 30yd chip truck is comparable to a 50yd grapple. Obviously, grapples excel at large quantities of wood. It’s rare for us to run into a project with that much timber at once, and unless you can get the grapple to it, loading directly into a trailer or can is going to save a step (vs). We run a big trailer that we are probably going to replace with a hooklift this year as opposed to going with a grapple for wood for that reason. Cans are also more versatile for hauling other materials and equipment.
I think it’s important to add that we do not have a lift of any sort in our operation, yet. We climb or use a crane for literally 99% of our business, working a specific (although not small) niche of tree work. The few days we need a bucket we sub one. My perspective on grapples may change after we get a lift, who knows.
OK here it is...First a disclaimer, I am not as experienced or nearly as big of an operator as some on here. We are a one crew operation, and instead of expanding to multiple crews as we grew, we focused on honing our skills and being more efficient. That led to trying different equipment, and trying different things.
As a side note - when something is working for us, we tend to close our minds to how we could better ourselves and what the options are outside of our point of view.
So we started with a 12" chipper, and hand fed everything. When we purchased a mini it was quite a gamechanger. Then we upgraded our chipper so we had hydraulic down pressure, and that was a huge help. After climbing for 9 years, we purchased our first lift...a Nifty SD64. My expectations were low, because we were working a lake market and most of our competition were primarily climbers. After using it, I realized that the profit margins were much better, and we did not need all of the jobs we were bidding to make a good living. We just needed to get the jobs we had the equipment for! That was a major shift in our operation, and from then on we focused primarily on lift work and crane jobs.
I realized that with the additional output of a lift we were going to run into capacity issues, so we decided to try JMAC's truck setup...A rear-mount grapple truck that has a U frame that you can chip into, and it also dumps. At this point I was still convinced that chipping was the best way to get rid of brush.
After a couple of months of chipping brush, and using the grapple to load logs on top, our chipper broke down for a week. My guys figured out that they could get nearly as much in the truck by stomping down the brush with the grapple as chipping, and then when they put the logs that crushed it down even more! So the chipper got left behind more and more, and finally they just quit using it. I will add that it would be overkill if we were just trimming most of the time, and where it shines is crane jobs and multiple removals.
Also where I live the land is a bit cheaper, and although I do get a permit to burn the burning regulations are less. But based on our experience, if I couldn't burn, I still think I would rather put the 50K it would take to buy a big chipper and spend it on land, and hire someone to come in with a tub grinder rather than chipping onsite.
Plus you add the additional value of taking all the wood out in log lengths, it can really make a difference! I actually just started a sawmill with all the logs I have accumulated over the last year, and although I don't expect to be able to fully supply it, it will definitely cut down on how many we will have to purchase.
Sorry for the long post...This is just a view from my corner.
