Josh, I haven’t had a chance to use this commercially yet. I have used it around the farm to move some wood. The fact that it is so light, maneuverable, and smooth in operation lends it easily to many different situations.
It is currently set up for use with a single horse, so that is limiting to some extent because I have more horsepower than that. I have several other devices used with the team that I can eaily move large volumes of sawlogs and tree length firewood, but there are always small logs and odd shaped and small pieces of wood that I just can’t afford to wrap a chain around. These pieces are also difficult to bunch together into quantities that make it worthwhile to transport using my hitchcarts or sleds.
I have theorized that a rig like this could make loading and transport of these very lowgrade products more feasible because of easy loading and the incredibly efficient way that it travels across challenging terrain. My kids and I cleared an old log landing to use for a shooting range. It had been 30 years since I had it open for logging use, and there were many hardwood saplings 2-8″dbh. Since I wanted the area cleared I decided to try out the wagon per my theory. These stems were 12-20 feet long when delimbed, or cut to that length if larger and longer. I couldn’t see wasting animal power to twitch them around, so I used my hand-held tongs and bunched them by hand into thre or four piles. I may have pulled them 20-30 feet at the most, but many were just a simple reordering.
Using the single horse I was able to park the rig close to each pile and hand load 1/2 cord quickly and easily. I transported the loads down to the house which was about 1500 feet away in a matter of 5 minutes. Turn time between loading, unloading and traveling both ways was about 30 minutes. There is a steep hill that we go down loaded, and the disc brakes worked great to hold the load back. The horse hardly worked at all, and the pieces were very easy to load and unload by hand.
In all I cut about 2 cords of wood which some would argue was marginal firewood, mostly Grey, paper, and yellow birch, and soft maple, limbwood sized, but it will burn. It could be said to be worth $75/cd log length where I landed it. I didn’t count the exact time for the entire project, but there was a few hours of saw work, a few more hours of hand bunching, and similar for transport…. So 5-6 hours into $150 is $25-30/hr which is commercially viable as a compliment to more lucrative products like sawlogs.
There are plenty of limitations, not the least of which is cost. At $10,000 delivered to USA, it would take a lot of wood to cover that. The upside is that it has top of the line world class workmanship and will last for a long time. It is easily modified to fit the use by lengthening, or shortening the main beam, and the amount of exertion that it relieves from the horse can go a long way in making animal power more effective.
Another issue in my mind is fitting it into the typical operation. I am making a pole for it to hitch the team up, as I rarely work singles separately, which is where this would ultimately shine. A chopper twitching with one, and another person running another single on the wagon could move a lot of wood, but I do not have, nor do I know many horseloggers who have an operation that has more than one person on a regular basis.
This spring I am working on a small job, 20 MBf of hemlock and pine for a custom timber frame. We are pulling from three fairly distant locations. The longest skid is about 1/2 mile. Currently there is good snow cover, and I intend to use sleds, but I don’t see much resilience to this winter, and if the sledding gets tough, I will be using the wagon with the team, and loading it similarly to the way we use the bobsled and scoot.
I’ll keep you posted, Carl
