Tractors and wood! Show your pics

[deezler]

Wait, you guys are burning, and/or cutting up autumn olive? No offense but that sounds like a huge waste of time.

The rootballs are super weak. Just bulldoze it with your front loader! Get the whole thing out of the ground, push smash it all into a pile somewhere, and it dies quickly.

I cannot fathom trying to attack my invasive bushes (autumn olive, buckthorn, honeysuckle) with anything other than a front loader. I could spend my whole life attacking it by hand and never keep up.

 

[Eagle1]

Wait, you guys are burning, and/or cutting up autumn olive? No offense but that sounds like a huge waste of time.

The rootballs are super weak. Just bulldoze it with your front loader! Get the whole thing out of the ground, push smash it all into a pile somewhere, and it dies quickly.

I cannot fathom trying to attack my invasive bushes (autumn olive, buckthorn, honeysuckle) with anything other than a front loader. I could spend my whole life attacking it by hand and never keep up.

Well some of us live in the hills. The only place it is a problem now is too steep for an ATV, if there was not a deep ditch on the bottom I would free fall the tractor down and then drive back around to the top. Done that in place with a landing strip on the bottom.

 

[FriendwithTractor]

Do you guys deal with Mile-a-Minute weed? (Not Kudzu, sorry southerners)

That stuff got several mature wild cherry trees before we finally managed to mow enough of it back regularly enough.

 

[deezler]

Well some of us live in the hills. The only place it is a problem now is too steep for an ATV, if there was not a deep ditch on the bottom I would free fall the tractor down and then drive back around to the top. Done that in place with a landing strip on the bottom.

Fair point. When I first got my land, I did a fair amount of bush-pulling using a brush-grubber off a long chain, in hilly areas myself. It's a two man-job if you don't want to constantly get on/off the tractor/ATV, but it can go pretty quick as well.

 

[Eagle1]

Fair point. When I first got my land, I did a fair amount of bush-pulling using a brush-grubber off a long chain, in hilly areas myself. It's a two man-job if you don't want to constantly get on/off the tractor/ATV, but it can go pretty quick as well.

I cleared my 30' high dam like that until I could have a landing strip on the bottom. A lot by myself, but now I can mow it in free fall....
The problem with hill side is the 30 wide bushes of Autumn olive half way up a 200' slope. You have to cut your way in to get to the trunk, while standing on a 70-80 degree slope. The stuff within 30 feet of the drive is easy as is the stuff you can drive to.
The top of the ridge is big trees with no room to work and National Forest so I really can't remove the trees, plus it's about a 1/4 mile long on my piece and holler goes back a mile or so into federal land.
I'll get to it right after I pull all the willows out of one of the back ponds. Never stops and never will but it keep me out of trouble.

 

[dodge man]

I also will dig out honeysuckle with my FEL. I also can’t get to all of it because of hills or too many trees. This fall when most of the brush was dead but the honeysuckle was still green I sprayed it with Roundup. I’ll see in the spring if that helped or not.

 

[Sawyer Rob]

Another nice day here today, so I sorted some logs,

SR

 

[Gordon Gould]

Another nice day here today, so I sorted some logs,

SR

Sorting by species or quality ? Nice day here too. In the 20's and sunny.

We lost most of our snow. I was going to pull out firewood this week but there is water every where - places I have never seen it. I can get around with the 4 wheeler so I did some trail/woods road maintenance instead. Never ending this year with all the wind and heavy wet snow.

gg

 

[Sawyer Rob]

Sorting for quality, I'm going to make some 2x6's.

It was in the 40's here today with some sun...

SR

 

[fruitcakesa]

Sorting by species or quality ? Nice day here too. In the 20's and sunny.

We lost most of our snow. I was going to pull out firewood this week but there is water every where - places I have never seen it. I can get around with the 4 wheeler so I did some trail/woods road maintenance instead. Never ending this year with all the wind and heavy wet snow.

gg

All our snow is gone and the swamps that used to be my woodlands will be frozen on top and soggy underneath with the cold weather for the next few days, and then more rain is expected next week.

 

[goeduck]

However, what you call fir is a lot different from the fast growing, short lived, soft wooded (balsam) fir which we know.

Our "Douglas Fir" is not a true fir and one was the tallest reliably measured tree in history at 393 feet.
==
Douglas-fir may well have been the tallest tree species on the planet. To put things in perspective: the tallest reliably measured Douglas-fir was 393 ft tall; the tallest known tree in the world today is a 381 ft coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) in California that Taylor co-discovered.
==

Michael Taylor & Steve Sillett Discover World's 10 Tallest Douglas-firs — Sugar Pine Foundation

The Sugar Pine Foundation is friends with two of the leading discoverers of the world’s tallest trees: Michael Taylor and Dr. Steve Sillett. For 30 years, Taylor and Sillett have slogged through dense, punishing underbrush and up and down vertiginous ravines in search of the tallest trees on

sugarpinefoundation.org

 

[Gordon Gould]

Our "Douglas Fir" is not a true fir and one was the tallest reliably measured tree in history at 393 feet.
==
Douglas-fir may well have been the tallest tree species on the planet. To put things in perspective: the tallest reliably measured Douglas-fir was 393 ft tall; the tallest known tree in the world today is a 381 ft coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) in California that Taylor co-discovered.
==

Michael Taylor & Steve Sillett Discover World's 10 Tallest Douglas-firs — Sugar Pine Foundation

The Sugar Pine Foundation is friends with two of the leading discoverers of the world’s tallest trees: Michael Taylor and Dr. Steve Sillett. For 30 years, Taylor and Sillett have slogged through dense, punishing underbrush and up and down vertiginous ravines in search of the tallest trees on

sugarpinefoundation.org

Where I am with our poor highland soil the trees do not get very tall. I'm not sure if I have a tree 100' tall, but if I do it will be a White Pine. I love visiting your Doug Fir forests. To me they are an incredible thing to behold.

gg

 

[oldrustysteel]

I cleaned up a lot of down trees. Most of the wood is too far gone to burn in the fireplace.. Will be good enough for the campers this spring.

 

[Molalla1]

I cleaned up a lot of down trees. Most of the wood is too far gone to burn in the fireplace.. Will be good enough for the campers this spring.
View attachment 839644

Nice little excavator you have there . . .

 

[oldrustysteel]

Nice little excavator you have there . . .

Thanks, possibly the most useful thing I ever bought.

 

[Piston]

A couple weeks ago I was looking for something to do in the shop and I made this out of a short piece of cutting edge from a snow groomer that I had. I had the idea of being able to place some log beams across a small brook for a bridge I want to build next summer.


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Someone asked me if it would work for blocking up firewood. So I tried it today. Just an experiment. I used a 30' long beech 9" at the butt with a 6" top. No problem lifting it with a 2000 lb FEL but it is a lot of cantilevered weight. A little bouncy driving forward.


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I have a set of grab hooks welded to the bottom of the grapple tines. I made a "V" hitch. The choker is 5' up from the butt.


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I thought the tree might swing side to side but with that "V" the tree is very stable. I had to push pretty hard on it to make it move to the side and it came back to center w/o oscillating.

The grapple sat on the ground while I plowed yesterday after 1.5" of rain followed by 5" of snow and a quick freeze. It grew a pair of ice slippers that won't come off w/o an axe.


No problem at all cutting my 18" blocks. I put one under the butt for it to settle on when I went by the balance point.


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Had to make 3 more cuts after I unhooked the choker and backed away.


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So it works fine. Cut 20 18" blocks.


gg

That’s a slick setup there Gordon. I like how you made the bracket to fit the receiver hitch, easily removable. Nice work.

I regularly use the 3 point grapple in a similar way. I wedge the butt end under the base cross bar and raise the 3 point hitch to hold the log horizontal while I make 23” cuts. It makes quick work but most importantly helps my back.

Then I spin the tractor around and push it up into a pile before getting the next log. This saves me from tripping over the bucked up rounds for the next time.

I’m more limited by my 3 pt hitch lift capacity so I can’t lift larger/longer logs full length.

 

[Piston]

Here are a few photos I took before all the recent rains that melted all of our snow.
Nothing ruins the excitement of getting out in the woods to skid logs quite like 3-4” of rain.

Sometimes I buck the logs straight from the FEL grapple. Obviously these are really small trees.

This is my current workflow, keep the trees whole until it’s time to buck them to 23” lengths, then onto the Split-Fire for a quick split, and directly into the dump trailer.

I’d love to claim that I was splitting next year’s wood (or even beyond) but reality is I’m not

The boiler is smoking heavily because I had just opened the bypass to reload. I load once in the morning and once in the evening on really cold days. Anything mild is typically once a day.
Usually there is no visible smoke coming out the stack.

The floors have been warm and the thermostat hasn’t been below 75 since I fired it up in October. We like it warmer than most

 

[Gordon Gould]

I took my camera with me yesterday. Still cutting fir stud wood. I have a dry place about 100 feet in from the landing.

Saw this Red Hawk Tailed too. Focus is off, sorry

I made a video cutting one tree. It's not a big tree. I put this description with the video so that people would know the thinking that goes into using this technique and the possible dangers that go with it if they are not familiar.

As usual I'm in no hurry.


Salvaging a dead but solid fir for stud wood. I would have liked to put it where the big boulders are but was afraid of breakage. I could have laid it in the road but then would have a mess to clean up. Those hard sharp branches can be hard on tires. So I decided to lay it against the pine behind it. It was at a rather steep angle so I needed plenty of wedge under it to keep from pinching the saw when I cut it off. And I needed to make sure it was completely separated from the stump and the choker as low as possible to minimize the risk of pulling the top over over towards me which can happen easily if the butt gets stuck on the stump or the butt digs into the ground or gets caught on a root. Using a snatch blocks helps keep me out of the danger zone.

gg

 

[oldrustysteel]

When I bought this, I really planned on doing dirt work with it. 21 hours later, I have only dug one small hole. About 30 minutes in the dirt and over 20 hours playing with wood. I may have a problem.

 

[arrow]

When I bought this, I really planned on doing dirt work with it. 21 hours later, I have only dug one small hole. About 30 minutes in the dirt and over 20 hours playing with wood. I may have a problem.View attachment 839903View attachment 839904

Backhoes are pretty handy. You can correct me if I'm wrong but I have to say I would not be enticed with traveling any great distance however with this rather narrow track width.
Very nice set up none the less.