[Scott G]

Here is the incident I referred to. Looks as though it happened in ’89 and the man was very experienced. I would write it off as your basic horse wreck which most of us have walked (or limped) away from several times.

http://www2.worksafebc.com/i/posters/1989/fatal8902.html

-Scott

[Scott G]

Outstanding!!

Happy B-day, Carl! 50?

[Scott G]

Another option for chainsaw milling is Rip-Saw

http://www.rip-saw.net/

I know of a fellow that used one exclusively to mill urban trees and then sell the lumber.

Pretty cool story. He had a small machine shop when I first started visiting with him and devoted a corner to wood turning supplies and the lumber he milled. I visited about once a month for about 1 1/2 years and each time I stopped by the wood corner kept expanding and he was developing quite an inventory of lumber in racks. As time went on the machine shop occupied a small corner and the wood working and lumber inventory took up the rest of the shop. Last time I was there he was having a close out sale on his very limited machine shop inventory. He built a very sucessful small business literally ” one stick at a time” all based on his rip-saw and urban trees that otherwise would have been destined for firewood or the dump.

[Scott G]

I built a barn with one and milled a lot of specialty stuff like mantles, etc.. They are painfully slow and can be hard on you and your saw. The exhaust is my favorite part…

You don’t need to buy specially ground ripping chain, necessarily. Using semi-skip chisel with the first two cutters filed at a sharp angle and then the third cutter filed back at a square ninety. Basically the first two cutters score each side of the kerf and then the third comes along and cleans it out.

I got a book over 20 years ago titled “chainsaw lumbermaking” by Will Mallof. Will is a logger from B.C. who did all kinds of crazy things with chainsaw mills.

Pretty good book if you can find it.

[Scott G]

Bark beetle salvage and trying to wrap up processing firewood for the season. Clearing/prepping a site for a community forestry sort yard for the County. Getting ready to get started on a TSI project for a neighbor and burning slash. Lining out an aspen stand restoration project for late winter – early spring that will carry into mid-summer. That project will be FUN!

Thoroughly enjoying our brief January thaw…

[Scott G]

One word…Halflingers! 😉

[Scott G]

@Biological Woodsman 15033 wrote:

I believe “high grading” is an untenable practice in all forest types, regardless of how the wood is extracted.

Amen!

I spend a lot of my time trying to ‘reconstruct’ and mitigate damage from the past in mixed stands.

[Scott G]

@Biological Woodsman 14945 I don’t want this to sound harsh, or self righteous about it, but there is a dramatic difference in what HHFF promotes and what you are describing Tim.[/QUOTE wrote:

Even though I am a little confused as well Jason, I’m not exactly sure that is what Tim meant.

I do not carry inventory as I am only a horse logger & forester. I charge a service rate which is based on time (hr/day) or area (acre). That was the same model I used most of the time even back when I ran a mechanical show, mostly gov’t contracts by the acre.

Charging for services takes out any incentive to high grade by the logger. Most of what I did was “worst first” or true restoration forestry; much of it based with a primary intent of, or funded for, fuels reduction. We often deal with what I coin as “knee jerk forestry” out here. Whether it is fire, bugs, etc.. the money and landowner’s interests tend to follow the crisis at the time. We all know that sound forest management addresses all of those concerns and that would be my foot in the door to pursue it with the landowner.

These jobs are my most prominent and publicly viewed advertising. Aside from my devout forest management ethics, it doesn’t do much good for your business if your job sites look like shit and they are prime examples of piss-poor forestry.

If someone wants me to just harvest the pumpkins and leave the inferior stock for a net gain in revenue or a reduced treatment cost for them, I just say ‘no thank you’, tell them why, and walk away.

In short, the service model works very well for me out here. Pretty much the only circumstance where I will buy stumpage is in high quality, post-size lodgepole pine on a terrific site. Unlike the forests you folks deal with, this is one forest cover type that truly responds best with appropriately scaled even-aged management, and is indeed how those stands would normally function ecologically.

Tim’s response will be the ultimate answer, but I have a hard time believing he would hire out as a high-grading horselogger.

[Scott G]

Getting involved with & truly caring for our neigbors & friends; unfortunately that seems to be a paradigm that has shifted…

There are signs…, when a neighbor/friend/ family member exhibits those signs the right folks need to get involved. Don’t expect the people to talk much at first, but you can get there.

I did not mean to make assumptions as to why this family has suffered this tragedy. There is a fair chance that I am way off base. It is just that this scenario touched off a very dark time in my life that had been securely tucked away and I see the same scenario playing out again & again within our society.

My prayers and support are with this family. It is the ones that are left behind who suffer and continually ask themselves “what if” questions in a vicious cycle that in turn takes a huge psychological on them.

It is time we put the “human” back into “humanity”…

[Scott G]

This is extremely tragic.

The issue is capital; in the push for production in order to make a go of it in modern agribusiness your operation has to be very capital intensive. Capital intensive operations rely heavily (almost exclusively) on economy of scale in order to break even, let alone turn a profit. In order to produce more you require more capital outlay which then further exacerbates the economy of scale model. It is an unsustainable business model that takes a huge toll on our society and our families. I was there in the logging business and I’ll be damned if I ever get caught in that trap again…

I was extremely close to crawling headfirst into my whole-tree chipper, had it all planned out, no joke…

This brings back some unhappy memories for me…

[Scott G]

Thats what I’m talking about!

Outstanding Jason!

I think we should move this over to the public forum http://www.draftanimalpower.com/forumdisplay.php?f=67

Carl, could we start a sub-forum in DAPFI for forest products?

Thx guys,
Scott

[Scott G]

Guy,

It is great to have you on board! I too find myself behind the paint gun trigger too often, but more so on the phone, ‘puter, and at meetings talking about forestry & forest health disproportionate to the amount of time I’m grabbing lines and throttling a saw.

And your tractor is OK… Myself and another fellow I work with are getting ready to fire up a mixed system with me skidding & pre-bunching for a Valtra tractor with a forwarding trailer. This system of horse(s) skidding to a forwarder is a perfect example of a very viable mixed harvesting system which has a great future/potential. Several folks are already using this system and its efficiency, especially in uneven-aged management, causes many forest managers in the “conventional” world to pay attention.

We will be working on an aspen restoration project we have lined out, removing all of the lodgepole to release the advance aspen regen. Nothing is better than a horse at selectively plucking out a lodgepole overstory while leaving the aspen regen intact.

Take a look at our contact list in progress https://sites.google.com/site/draftanimalpoweredforestry/ and see if there is anyone you think we should add. E-mail me with additions and/or corrections.

Thanks again,
Scott

[Scott G]

@Carl Russell 14889 wrote:

…why I was more interested in this “Organization” becoming primarily a network, spending a lot of time initially gathering contacts and engaging in broad and inclusive discussions to pull people together to see where we may be going…Carl

Understood, Carl. My current primary effort is trying to grow the contact list. I am starting to pull contacts that I have ran across from the past as well as dredging the ‘net. I have received many e-mails from folks who are enthused with the network of contacts we are putting together.

I guess I would like to see, in the spirit of networking, more networking… as well as further discussion on the topics we have discussed and outlined previously. This type of dialogue posted on the new DAPFI forum should slowly start to get folks involved; otherwise, without discussion, there is not much for them to follow.

Just put a brand new set of #4s with borium and snow pads on my boy today. It is amazing how the little things in life can just make your day feel good…

[Scott G]

Kevin,
I think I know of him. Ask him if he used to log for Chuck Dennis of the Colorado Sate Forest Service down at Genesee. I think he may have shot a video with them around 1980 or so with Denny Lynch.
-Scott

[Scott G]

Who’s the CO horse logger, Kevin?

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