Hud-Son Forest Equipment Uniforest Rotator and Grapple Forestry Logging
Hud-Son Forest Equipment Uniforest Rotator and Grapple Forestry Logging with Stihl Timbersports competitor, Nathan Waterfield.
I’m Mike with Hud-Son Forest Equipment. We decided to come out here and check in with one of our good customers, Nathan Waterfield. He’s got a few different Uniforest pieces and it’s always good to check in with your customers on a local basis and see how were meeting their needs.
What we did here with this setup is we took the Hud-Son Forest Equipment Uniforest 1800 scorpion grapple with the 465 rotator system and set it up on an excavator boom. A lot of times with the excavators the claw in the thumb is awkward using logs so if you’re primarily using it to land your logs the Hud-Son Forest Uniforest setup is a very nice addition!
So last winter we used the Uniforest 1800 on the Kubota track skid steer and it was good with the scorpion grab which is an awesome set up but what we had trouble with is that we could only pile up to about 12 to 16 high because of the machine and then you’re also having to back/forth all the time. So we decided to go with the grapple on the excavator.
We had the Hud-Son Forest Equipment Uniforest 1800 grapple we used the thumb and the bucket for a little while and it just was not efficient. It was hard to organize and you know the way the markets are with wood now having the ability to sort the wood out for different buyers. You know different markets, different purposes, it really helps us to be able to get the most we can for the logs. The competition is so great you need to be efficient so having additions like this is a great help!
The other thing to is that you know more and more we’re having issues with trucking. You know trying to get trucks on these landings to move wood for us. It’s harder and harder so what happens is you end up with piles of wood on the landing. You can see after two days of cutting that the landing is full. This is a beautiful landing. We’ve got all kinds of room on this landing and that’s pretty fortunate.
There’s a lot of jobs where we’re not so fortunate to have this much room.
A really beneficial addition to cutting the logs up like this is when you get into some really high quality wood. Veneer logs and that sort of thing. Hold the log in place that keep them from pivoting down and potentially cracking/degrading the value of the log so having the grapple again for that purpose is an improvement.