BREAKING OUT
Billet wood is becoming a value resource in many forests, but the challenge to collect it effectively and economically remains. We cover three very different solutions.
THERE’S PLENTY OF DOLLARS TO BE made from cleaning up the woody remnants from forests once the harvesting crews have moved on.
But maximising the value of that leftover wood has thrown up some interesting challenges to trucking companies, as well as loggers.
In this issue of NZ Logger, we focus on three of the latest solutions to recovering those valuable residues.
The first is a unique self-loading billetbolstered log truck that is helping to clean up skid sites around the Bay of Plenty and Gisborne regions.
It was put together for Darren Sinclair, of Whakatane-based DPS Haulage, by Patchell Industries, with the HIAB crane supplied by new distributor TRT.
“This is a unique unit,” says Darren, “probably the first billet bolstered truck on a Kenworth K200 with a cab-mounted crane, rather than just a tractor fence, and this cab also rises.
“We went the cab way for two reasons: for driver appeal and for safety. After years of open cabs sitting up and out, we wanted to
make sure the operator was safe, so we went for the cab option.
“And for obvious driver appeal, as nobody wants to sit up there exposed. You’re out in the weather about as much as any normal logging truck driver would be to chain up, or set the truck up, but in the cab and out of the elements for the duration...then chain up and then you’re out of there.
“It’s a reasonably basic build, a K200 multi-bolster truck, with a three-axle multitrailer, and the crane that lifts the trailer onto the back of the truck. The trailer is a little shorter, as we lose overall length compared to what’s commonly out there, but we built a three axle so the size of the crane can still easily lift it on and off.”
The crane itself is a Hiab Jonsered 1088S,
a cut-to-length timber handling crane with a lifting capacity of 12 tonne-metre and lifting 3,450kg at three metres. This crane has an outreach of 9.6 metres with a capacity of 1,040kg at that length.
“Years ago, I used to drive a self-loader,” recalls Darren. “I’ve always wanted one in the fleet but the customer base hasn’t always been big enough to warrant it. But as our company has got bigger and bigger, a couple of years ago I planned to have one and build it, to see what the interest was like.
“So I built it and put it on the road in April; we have a corporate customer in Whakatane and FDL Distribution has a private interest in it as well, plus our own private work.
“You need a good customer base because not everybody requires a self-loader, so with our private work and our customers in Gisborne, it was something that I wanted to put into the fleet to complement both areas.”
With bases in Whakatane and Gisborne, Darren established his own DPS Haulage operations in 2010, while continuing his long relationship with Patchell.
With around 35 vehicles in the fleet, plus daily subcontractors, Darren explains the reasoning to introducing the self-loader for the fleet: “We’ve built it multi-bolster, to cart the skid waste.
“Traditionally when export prices are really high, a lot of the pulp goes to the port and is exported out, and people start struggling for supply if it’s cost-effective to keep it uplifted and taking it into the mills, which you can’t put on a normal logging truck.
“It was a flip of the coin to see if it would all pan out. There was initial demand for this type of product, but now there’s even more emphasis on it due to environmental issues rather than leaving it in the bush, and some people are pushing to get that material out of there.
“Crane trucks like ours normally come in after the logging crews have moved out, pick up all that remaining material and anything
left behind and deliver it, plus they leave the skid in a clean and tidy situation. With the Tolaga Bay floods, and all that rubbish coming down the river, all this material has become rather important to get out rather than leave behind.
“With the billet wood, we also load and unload ourselves at the mill because the material is too short for the loaders to handle, so we do that ourselves. It takes a little longer, but you have to cost that into the business model – it’s not something we put our hands up to do, but the material is that short, it’s just easier. Once you put it on the ground, the loader can pick it up, so it’s unique and better for the guys to unload it themselves.
“It’s also about making the skid waste a little more profitable for everybody and getting it off site, and to the mill. That material is just as good, it goes into the mill as normal pulp would go, it’s fresh and they take it and chip it as though they would a load of six-metre pulp.”
Of course, the bottom line always rules business and with a specialised unit like this, it’s sometimes more a gamble than a guarantee.
Says Darren: “In the old days, it’s an expensive way of getting the stuff out, because you give quite a bit of tare weight away; plus, there’s loading/unloading compounds. You need to cart the type of material, it’s quite expensive to do...and expensive to build a truck like that.
“So you’ve got to have a bit of demand, both ways: how to get it out, and maybe some of the customers may need it to make up their pulp numbers with this type of material. They’ve got supply agreements and need to supply a certain amount, and we’re all ticking two boxes: using stuff that normally gets buried and leaving the skid site as clean as possible.
“It’s not all about being cost-effective, though the days of leaving this stuff behind may be numbered.
“I’m driving (this unit) myself, up to six days a week and we’re doing work with our private customers and also with Rayonier, so we’re tweaking everything. I’m ironing out the normal teething problems and learning how it all works.”
The change to TRT distribution for HIAB in New Zealand also meant the crane was the final part to be fitted to the unit.
“We didn’t really have time to test anything,” adds Darren, “as we had customers cutting wood and waiting for us to pick it up, so we jumped on it and went. We had to tweak crane pressures and put a little time into it to find the dos and don’ts, and it’s been some time since I’ve driven one, and we’ve got it to a place where we’re about to start teaching a guy, and pass on those dos and don’ts.”
The truck was also a custom unit, a Kenworth K200 Rigid built specifically for a truck-mounted self-loading crane. It’s a day cab, with a 600hp engine, rated with a 28.5t GVM, and 97t GCM.
With the unit’s cost and seemingly limited potential, on the surface it could be asked if it’s actually worth building a unit like this. But Darren’s experience counters all that: “Back in the day, I used to drive one and they are a good option for not just that material, but also cold decking out the loaders as well.
“If you have one of our private crews – given trucking is a bit of a premium at the moment, and driver and staff is pretty tough – and you can’t put the truck where you need it, or there’s a breakdown, or the truck is off somewhere else, and it’s holding the crew up, we can take over with that crane truck and cold decking, load our trucks and finish the job for them.
“There’s also general cleaning up, cleaning the skids, and multiple things that we can do with it.”
Meanwhile, down in Rangiora, Canterbury, Musson Logistics has gone big with its answer to transporting billets with the 50MAX self-loader built by Mills-Tiu.
This is New Zealand’s first 50MAX billet self-loader, and while it’s not the first time the idea has been floated, Mills-Tui and Musson Logistics combined with International and ExTe to build a very special unit that some thought simply couldn’t be done.
Combining a self-loader, lightweight constructed trailer with a Palfinger crane and some lightweight engineering, the whole operation came together to create a truly unique piece of logging equipment.
“This is the first 50MAX self-loading log truck that can piggyback its own trailer,” says Mills-Tui’s Dean Purves. “People have looked at doing it before, but due to the weight of the trailer and the crane’s lifting capacity, they’ve often found hurdles too big to overcome.
“Our logging trailers are generally lighter than everyone else’s anyway, but we use lightweight alloy ExTe bolsters to bring the weight down, supplied by The Forest Centre in Australia. We managed to get the tare weight really light, but it has actually got three bunks, so six bolsters, which made it even more of a challenge.”
Recalls Dean: “It all started off with an idea from Ricky [Musson Logistics] and his awesome operator, Stu McKenzie and morphed into what we see here. We discussed the whole concept some time ago, and it gathered some wheels.
“Originally it was going to be a four-axle trailer, as we didn’t think we’d be able to do it any larger ourselves. But we looked around and decided to come up with a five-axle with a 50MAX permit.”
The whole unit starts with Intertruck and an International 9870 600hp tractor, which offers a number of key advantages,
according to Dean: “We could custom build the International in New Zealand, at Tauranga.
“After a fair bit of design work by MillsTui’s Jeff Miller, Intertruck custom-built this 8x4 that is perfect for the job. And they built it to the specifications we needed, plus it’s got a set-forward front axle, which gives us a really good deck length, to get the trailer up on it.”
The chassis is double-flitched, and International basically put another skin inside the chassis, typical of the crane construction industry, to add strength. “Normally if it’s prebuilt you have to strip all the suspension,” explains Dean, “but with International building it here, it’s all part of the build process done in Tauranga, rather than the labour and time intensive headache of having to remove axles, retro-fit all the gear, and then reassemble it.”
This provided a solid, crane-ready base for Ham Sheck and the production team at MillsTui to build on.
The load is restrained with LT tensioners mounted under the deck. On the back doing the heavy lifting is a Palfinger Q170Z crane specified to Musson Logistics requirements, which weighs just under three tonnes. The Q-Series Palfinger is the upper end of the medium-duty class of EPSILON cranes in this model range and covers lifting capacities of 15-to-18 tonnes.
The trailer is something special too.
Weighing in at 5,660kg, the chassis is a Mills-Tui hi-tensile chassis shortened to suit and fitted with the lightweight alloy ExTe bolsters, which are all multi position to allow a wide range of loading options.
The truck is also spec’d with a Hardox skinned log deck with the Exte Quick Lock bolsters, Mills-Tui cab guard and dunnage racks all sitting on SI Lodec load cells for accurate weight readings.
And that magic weight reading? “It can carry 28 tonnes of payload, and with the 8x4 has plenty of traction,” explains Dean.
That’s around three tonnes more payload than a conventional unit, which in scale terms is more than 10%. Plus, there are savings on RUC costs, which combined, makes it instantly more attractive.
Being on a 50MAX permit, there are some route limitations, but with the everexpanding network, it’s becoming an increasingly attractive option for operators like Musson.
“It can pretty much go on any 50MAX road,” adds Dean, “so it’s not route-specific and they go all over the show… it really suits what Musson does: they cart all timber, long wood, log poles, so it’s a real multi-purpose unit for what they do.”
In fact, with the engineering side, that was the hardest part of the build because in use, the new unit is proving to be very effective, according to Dean.
Further north, Whanganui’s McCarthy Transport has built and operates another option for wood recovery: a double-bin Hyva hooklift truck and trailer.
“This is our answer to binwood. We used to run crane trucks but we basically abandoned that for this process,” says McCarthy Transport’s Engineering Manager, John Patterson, aka JP.
“Mark McCarthy’s been working on this system for quite a while, but in the last two years we’ve gone from no bins, to having four trucks with around 34 bins.
“We designed our own Makaranui trailers with an automatic locking system, so the guys don’t have to put pins in them; when they plug into the back it automatically locks the bin on. We load the bin from the rear, so there’s no hydraulics on the trailer...there was no saving for us going hydraulic, so there’s a little more time in turnaround but it works, and we’ve got a five-axle bin trailer that weighs about 5.2 tonne, so it keeps the payload up.
“We did consider a unit where the trailer is pulled into the back of the truck, but for us the“The other thing is there’s no hydraulics in the trailer, it’s a five-axle air trailer. The thing with these bins is that they all disconnect and load from the rear and use guide plates to ensure the bin is centred during loading. The auto locks are a cassette design to easily replace worn components.”
The Hyva hookloader system, distributed here by Tates NZ, is from Dutch company Hyva, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2019.
“The Hyva gives you lots of versatility, when you’re spec’ing it,” explains JP. “It’s easy to mount, for whatever chassis you have. It’s fully serviceable with rollers that can be greased and a locking system – and the parts are available ex-Australia.”
It’s the suitability of operation and the types of jobs that make this hookloader so appealing and suitable, adds JP: “The fact that we can pick the bin up and go, offers a huge advantage over a fixed truck, which needs a crane to load it and you’re carting a crane around all the time. We’re happy to cart the bin around, we can leave it at the skid site and rotate them in and out. Or on a smaller skid site, we’ll rock in, drop the bin, they will load it, we pull it out and away we go.
“We modified our mounts to put load cells underneath it, an Elpinstone load cell scale system… so you can bolt and unbolt the whole system in a couple of hours. We wanted to be able to pull the bin onto the truck and know exactly what it weighs.
“These guys pick up logs from 800mm to 3m. Some skids are big enough to put the bins on site and they load it, we just change them over. Other skids that are tight, we rock up any time of the day or night, drop the bin, they load it, and we take it away and put another one there. It all depends on the size of the skid, but it only takes them 10 minutes to load a bin – it’s done in a flash.
“And because it’s a bin, you just chuck it on and go. We’ll cart anything in a 150km radius.”
All the bins are fitted with telematics to keep track of where they are.
“It’s another income stream for the harvester – for stuff they were previously throwing over the bank,” says JP.
“From a harvester’s point of view, you pick it up and instead of throwing it over the bank, just drop it in the bin, and it’s that easy. It’s a quality product and you’re recovering the fibre that may have been lost...and you’re not fighting that export market for the fibre.
“This has been driven by Winstones wanting to be able to recover more fibre from their forests, and we’re seeing the amount of pulp wood actually reducing as we’re carting more binwood.”
Scales are built into the system because, as JP points out: “We’re on the skid site we’ve got no idea what the weight is, so we pull each bin on the truck to weigh it – and we know just by the weight of it, which is the truck bin and which is the trailer bin. On the truck, the bin is only half full, but the trailer bin is full to the top.
“We’re running these units at 50MAX as we can’t get HPMVs up the Paraparas, but we’re working on that – but the reality is we can’t get the volume to get the weight up anyway.
The design of the bins themselves is an ongoing process, explains JP: “We’ve looked at and reviewed the bin design with a new shape and curved sides.
“The truck bin on this unit is our version one design, and the back bin is the revised design. The very first bins we did were a truck bin at 6.4m and the trailer at 7.4m, but both these are at 7.4 so it doesn’t matter which bin is used where.
“Originally we made those bins to match the bins that came with the original unit – we initially built six bins to suit that unit, but after them, we’ve done them all the new bins at 7.4m and then we even stretched one to 8.4m as a tipper bin.
“The evolution of design, initially pretty much a Real Steel design, for the scrap metal guys with a barn door design. We had no real experience, but to suit the McCarthy system, we basically made a couple of changes: all our bins have at least 100-150mm taper, so they’re wider at the back than at the front to aid the discharge.
“With the barn doors, we identified some potential risks so we’re now swinging the doors from the top – and all the feedback is positive. So, this new style is the future for us; we managed to keep them the same weight but improved them in the way we lock the door.”
You could say they’re hooked.