Today we are in the Catlins with Mark Farrell from Farrell Logging to Iron Test his new Komatsu 895HD Comfort Ride forwarder.
Eastern Southland looks like one of the luckiest parts of the country to be a logger. Smooth rolling hills, nice tall and straight tree stems and bright green grassy paddocks of beef and mutton to ensure a tasty dinner after work. And then you can add in zero early load outs to take a fair bit of stress out of your day.
The weather forecast is for a fine, sunny day and I guess that may be happening up above the rain and wind chill but it isn’t much use to us there.
The old cotton shorts get a good workout drying the rain – soaked camera lens and then the windchill starts to have an effect on stability as the first signs of pre-hypothermia set in. I have to run from one shot position to the next to keep warm despite five layers of clothing. On the plus side there is some good shooting light diffused through the mist.
This is our second time into the Southland eucalypt clearfell operations and it still surprises us to see thousands of tonnes of debarked logs laid out over many hectares waiting for collection. Today there is a difference because there is some extra steep ground in this block, so there is a contract tree faller named Fizzer who has tipped most of the steep area trees over with his Stihl 661 and he also has a 22-tonne excavator down there tracking. It has a quick hitch, so can go from grapple to bucket in a few minutes. Once the tracks are done, the 22-tonne Sumi operator and Mark, with his Komatsu harvester, will shovel the wood up to the track and process it so the forwarder can collect it.
Bigger tractive effort
And it’s a big forwarder. There’s a 7.4-litre engine packing 280 horsepower and a payload of 20 tonnes. This is similar to the Grimmer Contracting forwarder we profiled in the April 2023 edition of NZ Logger but this HD version is over a tonne heavier and has an XT transmission which hugely increases its tractive effort from 262Kn to 307Kn, meaning more power on the hills. This new range shift gearbox has dual parallel hydraulic motors. There is 49 L/min more hydraulic flow at lower RPM and it has some special Comfort Ride features well suited to high SPH (Stems Per Hectare or maybe that should be Stumps Per Hectare) forests such as these which are harvested on a shorter rotation than less heavily stocked radiata stands. But more about that later.
Mark Farrell has been running a harvester for many years in Southland, starting out in a 50/50 partnership with DT King. He then bought out DT King’s share and now Mark, along with his wife Vicki, runs Farrell Logging as a standalone contract harvester owner-operator. Contract forwarder owner-operator, Bill Grant, usually worked on the same blocks picking up the logs that...
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