Thanks for the kind words guys.
I was meaning to get cutting already, but my "real" business has been keeping me occupied with some snags. Right now I'm not sure if I'm going to try to cut this summer yet or wait until the heat blows over into fall. Aspen slash should just about be illegal for deer hunting, so that might make for a wonderful bow season.
I still need to improve the skid roads and all that, so I have plenty to do without actually producing timber. My land was last cut in the 70's, and then had some salvage done in the 90's after a storm. It's been 25 years since anyone harvested anything out of it and the trails show it. Getting the tractor around is challenging to say the least. I've only maintained 6' clearance for the atv thus far. My dented right fender happened 150' off asphalt within the first 10 minutes of my running the machine in this state (it came from South Dakota). Hooked a tree trying to maneuver around another one with the loader. Needless to say, it's a bit tight.
I am under a SFIA management plan, but my forester had his head up his butt when he wrote it and didn't follow any of my input. He has it planned for a 588 cord harvest of everything but red oak in 2017, and I'll tell you straight out, if someone cut that much wood out of my property I will kill them. We need to thin things out so my crop trees can speed their growth (I'm not seeing 4% annually on 12-15" stems), but it'll be a very selective low-impact thinning.
My aspen cull is mainly because those trees are approaching the tipping point of wind mortality. If I let them go much longer, they'll have more top breakage than DBH growth and grade improvement, so I'm choosing to cut them now and pull some money out of the stand in the process. I'm reinvesting most of that into my timber business though - it'll pay for the winch, the Chevy C65 truck I'll be buying to haul wood, and should cover expenses (fuel, oil, chains, etc) beyond those, but not much else. When I get into cutting the oak, soft maple, basswood, etc, then I'll start seeing some profits. We have a couple mills in the area who are paying ok for aspen delivered, but it wouldn't be worth cutting if I had to pay someone else to haul it for me.
As for the scabbards: The mesh was used in case I want to add a basket to that area. Yes, my chain is super dull too. I need to sharpen that one.
The inserts are just 1/4" UHMW with an improvised locking zipper cut on the edges. This plastic has a lot of memory and is flexible, so it's not fun trying to get fancy with dovetails or anything. It's also not like it's fine wood work, and these are going to get scratched up in use so I didn't try to be super clean about it. The two 1/4" nuts protruding from the bottom is the back side of a couple screws used to keep the inserts from lifting out. They're captured pretty good, but vibration makes everything move.
This is my 4# sledge (took an engineering mallet head and put it on a 36" handle) for driving wedges. I have nerve damage in my neck and hands, so I can't swing a 6 or 8# like I used to and the squeezing force to control a sledge causes my median nerves to go wonky. I can swing the 4# like a baseball bat though, and it's a great way to pop a tree over. I decided to hit it with orange paint for the growing season. Stuff just vanishes when you set it down out there.
