Forestry business owners need to secure continual access to lucrative woodlots and invest in heavy equipment. This guide introduces some Cat® forestry industry equipment which helps cut back on labor costs and maximise productivity.
The forestry industry thrives on dynamic and streamlined work. Each critical step in the timber-harvesting process needs to be highly efficient, using high-quality heavy equipment that optimises output and completes essential tasks. From felling and extracting to loading and transporting, forestry workers depend on specialised machines that get more done in less time. Additional machines are required to prep logging sites by building and maintaining service roads that give easy access to loggers and their equipment.
Here’s a helpful overview of the common types of heavy equipment for forestry industry work and the applications for which they’re best suited…
Dozers
Long before logging crews can enter a woodlot to begin processing trees, access roads need to be built, and a dozer is the go-to machine for the task. With sheer brute strength, dozers move at a slow speed and plough the earth, trees, boulders and everything else, creating a clear path in their wake.
Dozers are often used during and after forest fires to create a fire break – a long line cut into the forest to disrupt the path of a fire so it can’t continue burning in that direction.
Dozers come equipped with tracks instead of tyres, which gives them more traction and allows them to work on steeper grades.
In addition to creating roads, dozers are also excellent at leveling ground with their large, heavy blade.
Excavators
The excavator is an extremely versatile machine featuring a large arm that can be equipped with a wide range of attachments. Most commonly in forestry work, a bucket attachment with an opposable thumb is fitted to give the excavator the ability to dig holes and trenches and move around heavy objects like trees, boulders and other equipment.
Excavators are also frequently used to dig out tree stumps after a tree has been felled. The bucket attachment allows the excavator to make precision digging movements ideal for digging around stumps and unearthing them to be transported.
Usually, excavators come equipped with a blade that can be lowered and used to push earth, giving the excavator the capability to level soil and create pathways free of debris.
Forest machines
Forest machines are designed specifically to meet the demands of tree processing in the field.
Similar to an excavator in their design and operation, forest machines can come equipped with a few different attachments to perform common tasks required during a tree-harvesting operation. These attachments include:
• Felling heads: designed to grip a tree and cut it at a low level. After the sawing is complete, the forest machine can reorient the tree horizontally and stack it to the side
• Harvest heads: specialised equipment for cleaning the fallen trees of branches and stems by feeding the tree through the attachment with feed rollers as delimbing knives remove any branches, and
• Grapples: specifically designed to grab bunches of delimbed trees, grapples have a distinct advantage over using a generic excavator bucket-and-thumb attachment because of their curved design that can cradle many trees at once.
Graders
The grader is heavy equipment used to create smooth, flat road surfaces.
Equipped with a large blade, the grader runs along the road surface and breaks down larger chunks of rock and debris while using those pieces of debris to fill shallow holes. The result is a flatter and smoother road, free of potholes, uneven slopes and other debris.
Graders are frequently used on established forest service roads to reestablish the smooth surface that existed when the road was first constructed. Over time, logging trucks and other traffic begin to create imperfections in the road, such as potholes, cracks and other obstacles, giving the road a washboard surface and making it almost undrivable.
Depending on the frequency of road traffic, a motor grader might be required to service a forest road multiple times each month to keep the surface smooth and ideal for logging-truck traffic.
Skidders
Skidders are an essential piece of equipment used to transport a large number of trees to another location where they can be loaded onto a logging truck. After the forest machines cut down and delimb trees, the raw timber is stacked in a pile to be transported by truck to a sawmill or other lumberprocessing facility. The skidder comes equipped with a heavy-duty grapple attachment designed to grab a large number of processed trees at one end and drag them to their next destination, usually an area more suitable for loading a logging truck.
The skidder grabs the trees on one side and lifts them off the ground. It gets the name ‘skidder’ because the opposite ends of the trees skid along the ground as they’re being transported. Depending on the distance between the processing area for the trees and where they are loaded onto the logging truck for transportation, a skidder might be an excellent timeand money-saving option for a forestry operation.
Cat forestry industry equipment Businesses looking to invest in new forestry equipment need a reliable supplier. For more information about Cat forestry equipment, visit your local Cat dealer:
* NSW/ACT: WesTrac 1300 881 064
* Victoria/Tasmania: William Adams 1300 923 267
* Western Australia: WesTrac 1300 881 064
* Queensland/NT: Hastings Deering 131 228
* South Australia: Cavpower 08 8343 1600
* New Zealand: TERRA 0800 93 39 39
See more Cat forestry equipment at cat.com.