A diesel-electric hybrid grapple yarder from T-Mar Industries is now working in British Columbia’s coastal forest, and it has the potential to cut fuel and maintenance costs, helping to make coastal logging more cost effective.
Hybrid cars and trucks seem to be everywhere these days – but a hybrid piece of logging equipment recently started working in the forests on the British Columbia coast, and it’s getting some attention.It all started with a mini, unintentional demo in the yard of T-Mar Industries of Campbell River, on BC’s Vancouver Island, a couple of years ago.
Family-owned T-Mar Industries is a long-time supplier to the forest industry, meeting the needs of BC loggers – and loggers as far afield as New Zealand – with heavy duty logging equipment that the company manufactures, and rebuilds, in Campbell River, such as grapple yarders, grapples and related logging equipment.
In other words, they deal big time in the heavy duty equipment required for steep slope yarding.
For those unfamiliar with the equipment, Tyson Lambert, Vice-President of T-Mar, described grapple yarding as a “zip line for logs”. Cables are laid out over a steep slope area from the grapple yarder, logs are attached to a grapple that rides the cables and reeled back in. Grapple yarders are used in areas that are inaccessible to conventional machinery, such as skidders.
“We’ve been around for 40 years, producing equipment,” explains Tyson. “And we’re always looking for ways to improve on our designs.
“And the idea of doing something hybrid came up in our engineering department a few years ago, what with all the electric powertrain parts that were becoming available.”
The thinking was that perhaps the traditional powertrain components that T-Mar had been using for many years could be replaced with new electrical drive technologies.
“We started doing a little research on it, and we had had an engineer, Philip Biebach, that was pretty conversant in that hybrid world, and had done some of that work in the past. We started out by designing and building a small prototype, just to make sure that these types of drives and components would work in a grapple yarder.”
At its core, the hybrid concept was solid, since a grapple yarder is a regenerative machine – it can utilize regenerative braking to recapture energy that would otherwise be spent keeping the cables tight, and convert it into electrical energy to reuse. They built the prototype, and it worked really well – better than they expected, says Tyson.
“We were doing that on our own, and Dorian Uzzell and the people from Wahkash Contracting came to visit the shop one day.
“We had the prototype set up in the yard, and we were simulating pulling in logs – and the Wahkash guys went on the controls, and had a go at it. Dorian and the guys were so impressed with what they saw that day that they commissioned us to build a full-scale working hybrid grapple yarder, using the technology.”
When it comes to BC coastal logging, Wahkash Contracting, also based in Campbell...
