WHEELS ON FIRE
THERE’S AN OLD SAYING THAT GOES: IF YOU KEEP doing the same old thing, you’ll always end up with the same result. In these highly uncertain times, foresters are understandably more conservative with decision-making in order to protect their businesses, people and homes from the ravages of an overstocked Chinese market (again), lower log prices (again) and something completely out of left-field, like the Covid-19 virus.
So, it’s refreshing when someone steps outside their comfort zone and tries something completely new, both to them and much of the industry.
Rotorua-based contractor, Conan Hemsworth, is one of those people.
When his clear-fell contract with Hancock in Kinleith Forest finished a little over a year ago, Conan could easily have throttled back and relied on his two remaining crews with Port Blakely to sustain the CMH Contracting operation. Yeah? Nah.
He decided to give something else a go. Production thinning… with a difference. Using a wheeled harvester instead of a tracked base.
Wheeled harvesters have become a hot topic among thinning crews, with a handful operating around the country in place of tracked machines.
But it would be wrong to reference this trend as a ‘wheels versus tracks’ war.
There are good arguments for and against both options, and it just comes down to whatever suits a contractor’s circumstances, the forest owner’s objectives and the working environment.
A wheeled harvester made sense for Conan Hemsworth when he decided to pitch for a thinning job with Timberlands in Kaingaroa Forest that he heard about when his Kinleith contract wound up. He’s not new to thinning. It’s where Conan started 20-something years ago after returning to New Zealand following his OE in Wales, working in a variety of forests, as well as playing rugby.
Conan’s early thinning experience was as manual fall and trim and then as an operator of a forwarder and compact tracked harvester.
Drawing on that background, Conan proposed an entirely new approach in Kaingaroa, which fitted in with the thinking of the team at Timberlands. They, too, were interested in experimenting with wheeled harvesters to production-thin their
burgeoning estate.
Not only will there be fewer trees to thin and less volume per hectare to extract, under the upcoming structural timberonly regime, they’ll be growing closer together and Conan says: “Someone needed to do something different and wheeled harvesters seemed to be the way to go.
“Europeans harvest a lot of wood around this size using wheeled machines and they make it work. Like me, Timberlands were a little bit nervous, but they were looking to have a contract out there trialling a machine and I wanted to give it a go.
“The reason I went for wheels is partly environmental, but also the standard of quality of what I leave behind. Low impact on ground soils and no root plate damage. There’s less compaction and disturbance with wheels.”
All good in theory, but before putting that into practice, Conan needed to do more research, especially on which wheeled harvester would best suit his plans. There’s plenty of choice these days, mostly out of Europe, but not only did the machine and its associated head need to be right, the choice of supplier did, too.
Eventually he whittled it down to one of the products from Komatsu Forest, which pioneered wheeled harvesters in Scandinavia back in the Valmet days. Importantly, the Komatsu Forest NZ operation is based on his doorstep in Rotorua and there’s solid back-up from Australia, where wheeled harvesters are popular in thinnings, which means parts/back-up are only a short flight away.