Iron Tester, Brady Clements. When it comes to bunching grapples, big is good and tough is even better. The new Duxson BX1100 is both. It’s hooked up to a John Deere 2156G XD LC at Nathan Taylor’s Mechanised Cable Harvesting (MCH) windthrow salvage operation near Nelson. First impressions are that this grapple is an armoured vehicle. Having used and accidentally abused a few bunching grapples in my time, and repaired and re-engineered them as well, this one answers a lot of questions with well-placed steel plates, ribs welded in for rigidity and cleverly recessed pin bolts. The high-strength alloy steel plating both strengthens the frame from the incredible leverage the ram exerts when wrestling logs, and protects the hoses and rotator from stray logs that have been known to end up in there, especially when shovelling. And the jaws are designed to optimise performance during loading, sorting, shovelling and bunching. But more about that later.

We enter the forest and drive up behind a Borlase Transport DAF log truck that is stopped to await approval to enter the MCH site for loading. Iron Tester, Brady Clements, knows the truck driver from his health and safety business and leaps out for a chat while we take in some of the devastation from recent storms. MCH is here in Golden Downs Forest  with its Log Champ 650 but it seems this country is pre-tracked for ground based harvesting.

“That’s from the first rotation,” Brady says. “They tracked all that with D6’s back in the Forest Service days and logged it with D6’s, so that infrastructure is all in place, they just reuse those tracks usually. Given that it’s winter and wet, it’s a good call to get the hauler into this ground to get the downed logs out quicker and with less ground disturbance.”

Brady is full of news about the recent storms: “Heaps of roads were shut with piles of mud, gravel and debris. At one place on the road there were large volumes of gravel over the tar seal and Taylors rocked up with two D8s to bulk out all that gravel. 

“Quite a few families were cut off for days. One logger I know went through some tribulations, first having a pretty serious accident just after the high water where he lost his ute in a washed out bridge approach. He braked super hard but didn’t quite pull it up before it went nose first into the deep hole in the road. 

“After escaping that, he and his crew spent several days being flown in and out by helicopter with fuel and supplies so they could log their way out of appalling conditions where the road was just trashed by trees for miles. They salvaged two or three thousand tonnes of that during the road clearing process.

“The rain was just intense. The rivers filled up and tributaries began flowing down roads as the next open path.”

Wrangling rivers

It’s disturbing to see how high the water tables and gravel bars are around the roads. In some places the flowing water...