[AT] Logging

[Alan Nadeau]

An excellent book on early logging in No. America is "Endless Tracks in the 
Woods" by James A. Young & Jerry D. Budy.  Very picture heavy with good text 
describing the way ingenuity made up for a (early) lack of equipment. 
Coverage from horse drawn "Big Wheels" to the steam winches and tractors and 
on to the early use of crawler tractors.  Should be available on the used 
book market but probably a bit pricey & well worth it, IMO.  Seems like I 
first saw the book when I was visiting Max McFadden at his place in 
Delaware.

Al Nadeau

PS:  Lots of pics of the sort of logs Grant described, some of them wider 
across than a man is tall.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mattias Kessén" <davidbrown950 at gmail.com>
To: "Antique tractor email discussion group" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2017 4:50 PM
Subject: Re: [AT] Logging


> Here the lumber is quite small. It has became a very controlled "industry"
> were trees will grow fo ca. 80 years, more or less depending on where in
> the country etc. You will even get a reduced fee for wide trees because
> most sawmills have problems handling them.
>
> Mattias
>
> www.rodjagard.n.nu
>
> 2017-10-05 19:57 GMT+02:00 Grant Brians <sales at heirloom-organic.com>:
>
>> On 10/1/2017 10:09 PM, Mattias Kessén wrote:
>> > http://www.atl.nu/skog/fran-minibandare-till-kvistare-kapare/
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > AT mailing list
>> > http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at
>> >
>> >
>> Mattias, I found it interesting to see the size of the logs being
>> handled in the article you posted the reference to. When I see the logs
>> harvested in California, except for those thinned logs harvested for
>> posts (a very small percentage) the logs are much larger in diameter and
>> length. We may have lots of dry areas and definitely we lost many
>> millions of trees from the drought and climate change, but the typical
>> trees harvested for lumber are feet in diameter not inches (or to be
>> more metric - over 31cm to over a meter). When looking at the logging
>> trucks plying the California and Oregon roads, their 30 ton load will
>> usually have many fewer trees than those small carriers shown in the
>> article.
>>
>>       I am sure a big part of the difference must be the species of
>> trees and the use they are put to. The White Pine, Douglas Fir, Coast
>> Redwood and many other lumber trees grown here can reach heights of more
>> than 100 feet before typical harvest is performed. The Coast Redwood
>> trees that are old growth typically are over 200 feet in height and
>> White Pines were too. I have seen Douglas Fir that exceed 150 feet in
>> height.
>>
>>       The variety of equipment shown in the article was interesting too,
>> because there is such a range of ideas as to how to perform tasks and it
>> appears that a range of mechanizations were tried, maybe more than here
>> but I am not sure. Also, seeing little tractors converted for logging
>> was interesting because the machine used here in the older times were
>> mostly Caterpillar crawlers simply with a winch and a blade. This has a
>> lot to do with the mountainous terrain here and the large size of most
>> harvested trees.
>>
>>       Something I found interesting in the Midwest was the growth of the
>> straight Mid-western Black Walnut trees for lumber. This is so different
>> from our use of the native "Northern California Black Walnut", which is
>> not at all straight, is slow growing and is primarily used for grafting
>> English Walnut cuttings for our Walnut production industry (the second
>> largest by area after China and the largest by production amount by far
>> in the world.
>>
>>       Thank you for the interesting posting even if I have to guess at a
>> few of the pieces of information in the article due to my very limited
>> Swedish....
>>
>>                 Grant Brians - Hollister,California farmer of
>> vegetables, herbs, edible flowers, nuts and fruit
>>
>>
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