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- Gabe AyersKeymaster
Good letter Donn, thanks for sharing what you do and see about this culture with as many people as possible. Now if we can get you come south again and help with our educational efforts if/when we can put another event together. Carry on my friend.
Jason
Gabe AyersKeymasterJoshua-
Had to chime in here on your questions. In terms of the shoes, I would urge you to shoe them as soon as possible. I have had really good luck with Kirk 3/8 shoes with 4 Mustad ice studs (2 front and one on each heel). The studs are easy to put in with some basic metal tools. You sure don’t get as much traction as using sharp shod shoes, but they are easier on the horses and don’t put as much strain on the nails and nail holes. My guys get plenty enough traction. In general, I am in favor of having them shod even if they can manage without because they don’t have to work as hard to maintain traction, which is easier on the team in general. They don’t seem to work as hard, particularly to get big loads started on the arch and bobsled.Skis vs wheels for me depends on conditions. I really like the arch when there is not deep snow to contend with. Like Rick suggested, the arch allows you to hook on to wood without having to role logs up on a sled. Also, you can get right to the stump with the arch which is harder with the sled. But, when the snow gets deep or when downhill sliding is a danger, a sled can’t be beat. The ease on the horses with large loads and the safety of bridle chains for the downhills are super around here. I have definitely found that having a second person in the woods to help with loading and unloading makes using the sled much easier and more efficient. Rolling the logs up on the bunk is a challenge for me at this point, but practice is helping with the process. Overall, I think I can get a bit more wood on the bob than on the arch, but with the arch you can pull stuff in much longer lengths which is easier in some cases. Good luck!
Gabe AyersKeymasterAlright, Lee the Horselogger, UTR
Gabe AyersKeymasterGeoff,
I really don’t know man, I bet there are folks that do. I happily accepted the device as a demo model from Athens, with a long term purchase agreement -including having it at SDAD annually – and should learn more about it.
I just learned last week that you can get a rubber mat or belt on the treads and that is cool. A problem for me is that my hard logging horses are all shod with toe plates and heal caulks which won’t help the treads last or could get caught and cause a real wreck. Let me do some research on it for you. Sorry for my ignorance, I am just a man, not “the man” on anything really, thanks for the compliment though!
There are several sprockets in the gear box that allow for different PTO speeds and I will try to find out more about it for all of us.
I bet you can call the number for them on the youtube piece and ask about that information and get precise details. Ammon Weaver that built this thing is a mechanical whiz. I heard that he designed the gearing for the I and J ground drive pto forecart.
I will say that this set up will split wood faster than anything I have seen.
Jason
Gabe AyersKeymasterMaybe someone should offer a degree in UTR.
Under the Radar..try being sustainable with all the added cost and folks, the resource will pay for it, that’s our only source of real wealth creation….
I ain’t doing this as a conspiracy, it is just a natural evolvment of being poor all my life and rankly independent. Every other aspect puts control of my life in someone else’s hands….complex situation for sure.
Best Regards,
JasonGabe AyersKeymasterMark,
We do something like that down here, sometimes. I guess some would call it Community Based Sustainable Forestry. It could be seen as a fair sharing of the sharecropping approach to buying timber.
We break the work down into pro rated values and everyone does their part and gets paid by the thousand usually. There are infinite variations on the rates all mostly determined by the value of the products or services. I add services because sometimes you can get hourly work for various components of the work or the whole job.
An example or some considerations.
Stumpage, or the landowner share of logs harvested is around 30% of the proceeds of the sale of raw logs. On a worst first basis we may have an average log value of 300 per m (thousand board feet on international ruler).
300 per thousand for raw logs delivered sucks, but this is an example…and sometimes worst first doesn’t bring that much…
So you pay the landowner a hundred and you get 200 for the logger (s).
That could be 50.00 per m for felling, bucking, skid trail clearing.
50.00 per m for skidding
20.00 for loading
50.00 for hauling
30.00 for misc. expenses, seen as in common: lunch, sawgas, hay grain, truck fuel, chains, wedges and management, etc. There has to be a site boss or senior person and that is usually who does the procurement or gets the job.This is just a rough example of how some family and extended family and community based systems work. Everyone is a private contractor doing their part and getting paid by what they do. They work for themselves using their own tools and are seen as sub contractors by the law. I know it is harder in other places, especially some states up north. That is just an example of how some do this work in the Appalachians. I wouldn’t exactly call it a co-op. I have never known one of those that really helped everyone fairly. We think of it as ecological capitalism.
The prices can run all over the board. Each site has it’s own yields within the principles of restorative forestry and it really helps when you are in great woods that haven’t been harvested in 50 years, plus on good growing sites.
You will have come up with a fair split and share based on your own natural resource capital values. Everyone being independent helps, but it is not easy to pull off among all groups of people. Everyone has to work well together and be good at what they are doing, because the total produced pays everyone. Yet it is not production logging, but improvement forestry because you leave more than you take.
Just some thoughts from the southland.
Best Regards,
Gabe AyersKeymasterGeorge-
We had our best day yet yesterday with the bob. We started at 7:45 AM and finished about 4:45 PM – a long day for sure. Two of us and the team managed to cut, twitch, and bob about 2500 bf. However, I would never expect to get to this total on a regular basis. Like Carl, when by myself I consider 1000 bf a good day. I think the improved total is the result of picking a better spot to load the bob (less twitching and more distance on the sled) and also bigger wood packed more closely together. In addition, we had a rare day when no trees got hung up, we had no equipment breaks, and the weather was perfect!Gabe AyersKeymasterwe just take some baling twine and tie a cheap stocking cap over their nose and a worn out blanket on them and haul them off to work.
Jason
Gabe AyersKeymasterhttp://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89098654833
This is a piece of older information we use as required reading for our Biological Woodsmen apprentices.
Hope you enjoy it.
Best Regards,
Gabe AyersKeymasterThanks to Rick for being there for the interests. They were wanting to do a vanishing breed deal and all three of us are pretty sure we are not the last of a kind, but that there are many more to come to do this work, on their own terms! Not bad public education about the work being real in the here and now. Thanks for sharing Mark.
Jason
Gabe AyersKeymasterJeremy-
We don’t often have temps like that on a regular basis, but here is what I figure on the cold. As long as a horse is well-fed, not soaked in sweat, and has a spot to get out of the wind, I don’t worry. I don’t have any stalls at all at home, and my guys are out year round. They do fine. I do pay more attention when trailering in winter, and I use a blanket that cuts the wind. When I bring them back from a local job and they are still sweaty when we arrive home, I feed them a little hay inside the barn (just tied to a post on rubber mats and bedding) until they cool down and dry off, then they go out. Perhaps with an elderly animal I might alter things a bit. Of course, different folks have their own opinions on what I do, and I have heard gotten some questioning of my strategy from time to time. I often find that the folks who worry are not working horse owners and they need to satisfy their own concerns rather than any need on the part of their horses, but that is just my two cents.Gabe AyersKeymasterGeorge-
How much wood per day? Good question! I have scaled a couple of sled loads and they were 5-600 bf. My horses are still getting adjusted to moving the loaded bob so I have not really freighted it yet. I think I can 7-800 bf each load and hope to be up to that soon. So far, on most full days I have brought down 2 loads, and 3 on a couple of days. I hope to cut, skid, and move at least 1000 bf each full day, and more than that is a bonus. But, I have had a number of days that produced less than 1000 bf at the landing. Right now, I am losing the most time in loading and unloading and breaking new skid trails through snow and deadfall. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I am gaining efficiency with more experience and trial and error (sometimes lots of error). The total distance with the bob is, I would guess, 1/8-1/4 of a mile. Carl might have a closer figure for you. It seems to me that once the bob is loaded and the team can move it you can go quite a distance relatively easily, but like most horse drawn tools you would reach a point were the horses might not be the best tool for the job…Gabe AyersKeymasterWell, work continues on the pine job with the bobsled. I certainly have learned a thing or two about this tool as time has gone on. The efficiency of the bob is in the details – loading, chaining, unloading, etc. I have abandoned the metal ramps in favor of much longer hardwood poles which work far better. Now I can load almost all the sixteen foot logs myself, even the larger ones. The horses are becoming more confident in getting the larger loads started. Carl loaned me a spreader bar with adjustable holes for the fasteners for the jockey yokes. Now I put my stronger gelding closer to the load and the balkier one further out, and it seems to making all the difference! Conditions have become somewhat more challenging with deepening snow, but it has covered the wet spots nicely and the bob glides along well. Mark Cowdrey come out and helped me out for a day this week, which was great, and I invite anyone else close by to come and see the bob and work. It really is a fun tool to use in the woods. We have sent one load and will have another ready by the end of next week.
Gabe AyersKeymasterMichael-
Sorry to say that I am booked solid for the foreseeable future with woods work with my team. Unfortunately, there just are not enough insured horse loggers in northern New England to meet the need in terms of forestry work…good luck and keep looking!Gabe AyersKeymasterThe Traveling Woodsman (Ben Harris) on here has one of the blue log rite alumnimum ones and it is bent. Always seems difficult to get a hold on the log, but it must have taken hold to get bent.
I like and agree with Carls contention about older ones. My favorite peavy was built by Warren and has a hook on it I transferred over from one I got out of my grandfathers shed in the middle of the night. This was after he lay in the bed in the hospital and told me, boy, if you want any of that old stuff, you go get it right now. I did exactly what he said. He died the next day.
Makes you wonder if the people that manufacture this new stuff ever actually use it?
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