The mountain men of logging is what first crossed my mind when we arrived at NAB Contracting’s steep and bluff-riddled Manawatu block – we needed four-wheel drive just to get to their container – but then I saw that the gun loader operator was a woman named Caitlyn Thomsen. Perhaps Mountain Wo/Men of logging?
“Best loader op I have ever had actually,” says NAB Contracting owner, Nick Bunn. “She doesn’t seem to crack under pressure like some of the previous ops and is very smooth on the machine and trucks, and calm. She starts at 3.30am five days a week, and that’s loading up to 16 trucks a day and she’s fleeting 450 to 500 tonnes a day off our Tigercat 890 Logger and Woodsman processor.”
And it’s that giant 50-plus tonne processor that the NZ Logger Iron Test team is here to take for a spin today. As this is an emergency Iron Test (organised in just a few days due to three others not panning out from bad weather, new ownership deals etc) we have another brand-new Iron Tester, Charlie Herbert, who has saved the day by heading in from the nearby Whanganui-based Boyd Logging crew. Having worked for NAB in the past when they were a six-day-a-week crew, he slotted in well for a few hours in the 890’s seat.
There is a lot of new equipment on the NAB site and it is all going hard out when we step out of our wagons into sideways rain and fog.
The loader op is using a technique I have not seen before in that she is reaching over the log truck bolsters (loader is a Tigercat 875 with a massive 11.5 metre reach and high cab) and grabbing the logs, then rotating them and dropping straight down into the bunks – genius-level stuff when you add up the saved slew time and distance. Not possible without the reach or the high cab but also answers a lot of questions when cramming a hauler crew efficiently into a relatively tight landing.
Nick smiles and says, “People tend to say our landings look congested, but that’s how we like them. It is quicker and more efficient when you don’t have to move logs too far or, even better, if you don’t have to walk a machine to load a truck.”
Behind the loader is the big Canadian-made T Mar Log Champ LC650 swing yarder operated by Mitch Skelton running a grapple, and about 350 metres away on a grassy flat ridge top is a 30-tonne Sumitomo tail hold operated by Adam Treves out in the neighbouring farm paddock. Nick normally uses his Hitachi 400 as tail hold but chose to use a smaller and less aggressively tracked machine to reduce impact on the farmer’s grass.
Nick has found yarders to be a good investment and to be one of the few things a logger can buy that doesn’t seem to depreciate and sometimes actually goes up in value. “My first one I paid $650k for, ran...
