Movers & Shakers
Change is as good as a holiday, they say. So life must be one big vacation for Peter Stephens and his crew.
That’s because they are always on the move, getting to work in more forests over the course of a year than is the case with most corporate harvesting contractors.
TAUPO-BASED PJ & DA STEPHENS LOGGING TENDS TO specialise in small blocks in forests around the central North Island. Not by choice. They’re just so good at what they do Hancock Forest Management keeps them on hand to tackle the jobs that don’t suit larger outfits. Sometimes that means just a few weeks before shifting again.
Take the block they are currently clearing at the southern end of Kinleith Forest. The Stephens team had been in there a month when NZ Logger dropped in for this Breaking Out feature and they’ll probably be gone two months later, which includes a three-week break for Christmas/New Year.
“It’s a typical block for us,” says Peter, who owns the crew along with his wife Debbie. “We do tend to get a lot of the smaller blocks.” Because you’re good at it? I ask.
“I don’t know, we must be doing something right,” he answers. “Hancock has got a few double crews – large production crews – and they get into the larger blocks and we get the little nitty, gritty bits. Not complaining. That’s what we do and I like to think we are bloody good at it, which is probably why Hancock keeps putting us in places like this.”
Far from complaining, he’s revelling in this work, especially in such an easy block like this and in weather that has been much kinder to them compared to the constant rain and wind over much of 2017.
Their last forestry job was in Mamaku, which is renowned for being one of the most difficult to work in during wet weather.
“That was challenging,” says Peter. “It was just so wet. Luckily the block was flat, but it was still a challenge, plenty of slash going onto the tracks and corduroy.
“This block is a dream, by comparison. We’ll be in here until February. I’m not sure where we are heading next. Even though Hancock plan their blocks 12 months in advance you can still get chopped and changed around, depending on what wood they want, or other issues.”
With so many location changes, the Stephens crew has become adept at packing up and moving on without losing much production time.
It helps that they’re a fully mechanised ground base crew, which makes it easier to load the five machines and container/office onto transporters and get on the road. No cumbersome swing yarders or towers to sweat over.
Peter has been in ground based operations most of his forestry career, starting off in 1980 in Lake Taupo Forest, working in thinnings with NZ Forest Products in a crew run by Harry Amrein. Then came a big salvage job following a wind-blow event in 1982.
“We were salvaging all these fallen, thinning-sized trees, around ten or eleven years old,” he says. “That was interesting. Everything was done manually then, of course, so we were cutting them with saws.”
Not long after that, Peter began his long-time working relationship with John McDermott, interrupted by four years as a self-employed screen printer, producing T-shirts.
“I didn’t make a lot of money out of screen printing, so I sold that business and went back into the bush, working for John McDermott again,” adds Peter. “And he was into thinnings in Lake Taupo Forest, too. Thinnings was pretty well where it was at during that time.
“It was production thinning and we had a target of 50-to-60 tonnes per day. We had three or four cutters per crew usually and one skidder or a tractor with ten strops on it.
“And then when Archie Moffatt got his first processor, a Waratah, the first Bigwood they ever made, Johnny Mac put in a bid to do the extraction for Archie, it was up here in Kinleith. So we moved.”
The McDermott crew still felled the trees manually and dragged them out behind a pair of cable skidders, a Cat 518 during the dry weather and a D4 tractor in wet conditions. But it was hard work keeping up with the processor, and Peter says John McDermott had a vision of wanting to mechanise the falling as well. But many of the blocks they worked were too steep for a standard excavator fitted with a felling head.
Peter decided to get some experience of forestry with other crews for a while and by the time he returned John McDermott had purchased a levelling cab Timbco feller buncher to realise his dream of mechanising tree falling.
“I think he had the second one in New Zealand, Ray Brunton just beat him to the first one,” says Peter.
“He also purchased a Ranger G67 grapple skidder and got a D5H with a grapple on it, which was good in terms of mechanising because you didn’t have to get out and pull the rope.
“Then he ended up getting a couple of 527 tractors with a swing boom on them and they were quite a tool. They couldn’t pull a massive drag but if you could get up the hill you could just about get anywhere with them. Even if it was manually felled you could swing the boom out to it. In the winter you could still drive around with them, that’s the advantage of having a tractor and you had a blade so you could also do track work.”
By that stage – the mid-90s – Peter was off the saws and operating one of the McDermott machines, first the 518 skidder and then a D5H.
When Archie Moffat decided to add another processor, John McDermott was forced to start up a second crew, which necessitated the purchase of another Timbo and Peter was put into that machine.
“It had a Timbo fixed head, not a dangle mount,” he recalls. “It was a big learning curve, slowly working out how to operate that thing because if you don’t read the tree right and it wants to go one way and your head is fixed, then you could pinch the bar and bend or break things.
“But I tell you what, once you got the hang of it, it was a good tool. It was so stable on the hills with that light head. They were so ahead of
their time with the levelling cab. The stability and the hills you could climb was just amazing. I loved them, eh.
“I hadn’t operated an excavator prior to that and when I got on this Timbco it was like being in a different world, it was scary where you could go. On a steep hill you’d slew around and you’re 20 feet above the ground!”
Sadly, John McDermott was struck down by cancer and died, forcing Peter to hire an operator for the Timbco while he took on the role of Operations Manager for John’s widow, Glenna. He ran the business for her for a year before she decided that logging wasn’t her thing, and it gave Peter the opportunity to buy the McDermott crews.
“At the same time, Archie renewed his contract for a further five years and with that amount of work ahead of me it made it easier getting the loan from the bank – I was buying two crews, not just one, so I went in at the deep end,” says Peter.
“It was tough at first. I was buying basically second-hand equipment and some of it was getting high in hours, so there was a lot of maintenance and stuff was wearing out.
“Sometimes I look back and think I should have just bought the business and got rid of all the old stuff and bought brand new. But at the time it was a way of getting into logging with your own crew. And I’ve been here ever since – that was around the year 2000. I’ve now had my own harvesting business for 17 years and always worked in or near Kinleith.”
When Archie Moffatt downsized his operation, it forced Peter to slim down to a single crew as well, keeping the newer of the Timbco machines. Eleven years ago, they parted company and Stephens Logging began working for Hancock in its own right.
Without the Moffatt operation, Peter was forced to process manually on the skid to begin with, even though his crew was falling with a harvester, which dictated the type of forests his crew was assigned to.
To make life a little easier Peter purchased a Komatsu with a SATCO 630 felling head and matched it to Harvestec static de-limber.
“It’s funny, we look back on static de-limbers as being old technology, but it was good in the day and we were doing around 200 tonnes a day back then,” says Peter.
“And then we ended up getting a fall and trim head on the Komatsu. That was brilliant because you could fall and delimb at the stump.”
The move to purchasing a processor on the landing was always on the cards and was hastened by the spike in deaths across the industry in 2013, which led Hancock Forest Management to dictate that all the crews working in its estates must become fully mechanised.
The Stephens Logging crew has been fully mechanised for almost three years, following the arrival of the Cat 336D with a SouthStar 630 processing head.
“It’s been good,” says Peter. “As well as being our first processor,
it was our first experience with optimisation and that was a steep learning curve, too.
“Even though I was subbing to Archie all those years I never took any notice of the processing side of things or how they worked. I have to say it’s worked well for us, and the guys at SouthStar are just a phone call away and now they have a centre in Rotorua they’re pretty handy.
“We send the production file in every day using the app off a phone. I wouldn’t want to go back to processing manually again.”
The key to making a processor work well is to ensure it stays within specification, which means keeping on top of calibration.
“We don’t have to calibrate it that regularly,” according to Peter. “We still QC all the wood and he keeps in touch with the processor operator and if the calibration is going out he’ll let the operator know.
“You could go weeks without touching it, although we make checks all the time, but it’s not very often we adjust it. The wood here is good, the form is pretty nice. I suppose that helps.”
Much of the lower grade wood is shipped off to nearby Kinleith mill, while the best grades are offered to local sawmills and the rest goes to the port for export.
To keep the processor fed with wood, Peter now has a Cat 541, which has an electronic version of the SATCO 424 head to fall and trim at the stump.
The stems are pulled to the skid behind a John Deere 848H, one of the last H-series models to arrive in the country and the only non-Cat machine that’s now in the Stephens Logging fleet. He likes