Shiloh

With all due respect to Ren and Stimpy and 2-cents..that about sums it up. As of Sunday afternoon around 12:30 pm we had 112 pine logs on our property ready to go. As Paul Harvey would say, now for the rest of the story . . .

So far, this has been the most frustrating part of the job. And I expect it will remain that way.  Ironically I had “free” logs on property about 60 miles from  our property. The logs belonged to my dad and uncle and really aren’t free — we have to pay pulp-wood price for them. Even so, for 12 – 17 inch butt diameter logs that’s not bad. And we knew right were they were..heck I help plant them 25 years ago.  Well, I started calling around, craigslist etc. After a long frustrating search I had about four or five guys actually respond. We are talking about 112 marked trees in a well maintained timber lot with wide “aisles” and already been thinned. I had quotes from between $8,000 and $12,000. Hmm…that seems a LITTLE high. Remember, they are just cutting and delivering the logs .. not supplying them. At this point I must admit I kind of panicked. I didn’t know what to do. So, with my dear wife’s encouragement I kept calling. I finally found a good old boy name Bill who lived just a couple of miles from our property who really isn’t a logger anymore but who had buddies in the business. After several weeks we managed to get up to property and every one took a look. After another week I finally got a quote — $4,000 with me supplying the unloader.

Well, that seemed much better than the previous quotes and I agreed. After two more weeks it turns out the buddies decided not to do the work. I started looking again, predictably even more frustrated. I began looking at buying logs from somewhere else figuring at a minium of 8k for cut and deliver and another 3k or so for the logs themselves it would probably be cheaper.Well, to make an already long story a bit shorter, another friend of Bill called. We talked over the phone (he had already talked to Bill about the timber) and  he told me he would cut and deliver and unload them for 4k. The unloading part probably saved me at least 500 – 1000 dollars. Sounded good to me!

This conversation happened  a week ago last Sunday while I was driving up to Atlanta. He and his crew met me at the property at 8:30 AM the next Saturday and had the trees cut and loaded by 2:30 pm. Not only that, they did an excellent job and didn’t do any significant damage to the lot while doing the thinning.While it took a bit of shuffling with the trucks due to the need to get the loader/unloader to the property, we had the logs on the ground at our property by 12:30 pm Sunday. All in all, it turned out to be a good experience and I will be using this logger in the future. He logs all around the area and can get me whatever I need given a reasonable amount of time.

The equipment used was pretty cool. The loader/unloader was incredible – about 60 ft long on the back of a flatbed truck and able to pick up several logs at a time. The cutter would grab a tree, cut through it and then use the “hands” to control the direction of the tree’s descent. At one point I saw the cutter chop through what was probably close to a 60 foot tree and after the tree started to fall he stopped it about after it was at about a 30 degree angle from vertical and then drop it the opposite direction. This was done to keep the tree from crushing other trees on the way down. Very impressive and not something I can do with a chainsaw

Here is a picture of the crane used to load and unload the trees:

The skidder was used to drag the trees to the staging area where they were loaded into the log trucks:

And this is log cutter working on the last tree. The saw blade is down near the bottom of the clamps used to grab the tree.

Log Cutter

So what did I learn? I should have started seriously looking for a good logger before we began anything else.  And secondly, loggers can put a truck in places that are simply unbelievable. So don’t give up. Follow every lead. You will find them. If you want to save money it will take longer than you think. Sure, more money can buy you logs sooner. Even so, I want to keep my money to buy my truck.

And next time I go looking for property I will look long and hard to find a place that has the right timber on the property. Even if I don’t want to cut the trees down it will cost me pretty much nothing to have someone come in and just cut the trees down.  Then I can de-limb them and  a  simple chaining to the tractor and pulling them to the house sight.

The trees are Southern Yellow Pine – primarily loblolly with a a few slash pines. Some quick measuring shows they are between 12 and 17 inches at the base and 9 – 14 inches at the top (35 feet for most of them –  45 feet for a half-dozen). Now it’s time to debark them. . . .