Tractors and wood! Show your pics

[Hoobie]

Trail conditions here have remained solid so far thru this warm spell so I am still able to work the winter fir harvest. Here are a couple pictures from this morning.

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I'm cutting the stand, back to front and left to right. I try to fell everything to
the back so that I'm not working in, or winching logs thru, the slash. It requires some wedging.
Tuesday I made a little video showing some of that wedge work. The first tree, a back
leaner, wedged over nicely and had very little butt rot. The second tree had a right lean.
The butt was quite rotten. The rotted hinge couldn't take the jacking pressure of the wedges even though I left it heavy. When the hinge broke the tree went where it wanted - to the right, and leaned up against some adjacent trees. I pulled it off the stump with the winch then cut quite a bit of rot off the butt before I found good wood. Third and fourth trees were back leaners, especially the fourth. They were too small to get a wedge in behind the bar before the saw got pinched. In those cases I like to use the "tongue and groove" cut so I can get a wedge in. This is about an 18 minute video.

gg

Excellent video Gordon. It would be a treat to work with you. I would learn a lot.
Never understood the tongue and groove method until now.

 

[Gordon Gould]

Excellent video Gordon. It would be a treat to work with you. I would learn a lot.
Never understood the tongue and groove method until now.

Thanks Hoobie - Glad you enjoyed it !

gg

 

[eyi]

Very nice, I learned something too especially the wedging techique.

I have a question which is not exactly into the subject but related, about the tractor. Instead of those wedges I tend to work with my forestry winch and pulleys when I need directional falling help. Hence I often use the tractor. So i constantly ask myself if I should let the tractor run or shut it down. If I suspect I will need it within the next 10 minutes or so I let it run. I’m curious to hear what is point of view about that. When to let it run or shut it down ?

Thanks very much

 

[John_Mc]

Trail conditions here have remained solid so far thru this warm spell so I am still able to work the winter fir harvest. Here are a couple pictures from this morning.

View attachment 784279


View attachment 784280


I'm cutting the stand, back to front and left to right. I try to fell everything to
the back so that I'm not working in, or winching logs thru, the slash. It requires some wedging.
Tuesday I made a little video showing some of that wedge work. The first tree, a back
leaner, wedged over nicely and had very little butt rot. The second tree had a right lean.
The butt was quite rotten. The rotted hinge couldn't take the jacking pressure of the wedges even though I left it heavy. When the hinge broke the tree went where it wanted - to the right, and leaned up against some adjacent trees. I pulled it off the stump with the winch then cut quite a bit of rot off the butt before I found good wood. Third and fourth trees were back leaners, especially the fourth. They were too small to get a wedge in behind the bar before the saw got pinched. In those cases I like to use the "tongue and groove" cut so I can get a wedge in. This is about an 18 minute video.

gg

As others have already noted, that's a great video, Gordon.

To clarify for those who are not as familiar with the tongue and groove method of dealing with small back-leaners: The tongue and groove is not about steering the three. The hinge is still doing that (you are losing the center part of the hinge, but the part to either side still does the steering). It's all about making room to drive the wedge: with a small back leaning tree, on a "normal" cut, you might run out of room to drive the wedge and have it bottom out on the back of the hinge before driving the tree over. The bore cut which forms the end of the tongue makes a space to drive the wedge deeply without having it bottom out on the hinge. THe tongue and groove are just formed as a by product of offsetting the two back cuts (one on each side of the wedge), so you don't cut in to your wedge while making them.

 

[John_Mc]

Very nice, I learned something too especially the wedging techique.

I have a question which is not exactly into the subject but related, about the tractor. Instead of those wedges I tend to work with my forestry winch and pulleys when I need directional falling help. Hence I often use the tractor. So i constantly ask myself if I should let the tractor run or shut it down. If I suspect I will need it within the next 10 minutes or so I let it run. I’m curious to hear what is point of view about that. When to let it run or shut it down ?

Thanks very much

I use wedges for directional felling because it's faster to set up than using my logging winch. The winch gets called into service for that work only in more severe cases, if there is stump rot, or if I want to be extra careful about some high value target near by.

I always wonder about idling vs shutting down myself. I don't want to be restarting every 2 minutes, but 10 minutes is longer than I like to let it sit idling. The complication is that I don't always know how long it will take me, especially when working in densely wooded areas. Sometimes I'll get to the tree and realize I need to change the plan from what I thought when sitting on the tractor.

In most cases, I tend not to do just one tree and then move on. I'll work on several trees in the area with some goal in mind (lately I've been doing a lot of crop and mast tree release in a crowded stand). So I'm finding that more and more I end up shutting the tractor off. If I find I've been doing a lot of "short cycles" in a row, I'll leave it running the next time. My thinking is that it allows the engine to develop a bit of heat and also gives the battery a chance to recover from all those starts.

I also don't leave it idling at the minimum speed. I usually speed it up to something like 1200 RPMs or so. I used to be able to recite several reasons I had picked up over the years for this, but can't remember them all now. (I'm also no diesel guru, so can't swear those reasons were all valid.)

 

[eyi]

Thanks John

 

[John_Mc]

Thanks John

Here's a less than 2 minute video that shows using the tongue & groove technique for small back-leaning trees in more detail:

 

[Sawyer Rob]

Here's my "tractors and wood" for the day,

I scrounged them up from a job site.

SR

 

[sresites]

Great looking Agco Allis. I like the low profile.

 

[Smokeydog]

Those Husqvarna gas/oil jugs are great. Even carry extra chain and tools securely. $40 on Amazon but the price fluctuates. Orange not red so technically illegal in USA to carry gas and probably why you will not find them in stores?

White oak I cut almost thirty years ago now being finished for inside new window trim in the log house. Replacing used windows I installed 47 years ago for the previous owner.