The southern Kaingaroa Forest, south of the Napier Taupo Highway is an area of extremes with annual snowfall, bitter frosts, blizzards, heavy fog, dangerously cold windchill and heavy rain as clouds step up off the lake, rutting out the pumice-based roads. Then the summers can be almost desert-like and turn the place into a dust bowl - sometimes the deep bulldust from ground-up pumice requires 4WD to get moving on the main arterial routes and passing doubles requires light vehicles to stop in the ensuing white out. A very challenging environment for forestry gear and operators alike our Iron Test team discovers as they drive onto the R.A Douglas Harvesting skid in Southern Kaingaroa.
Crew owner Ross ‘Spud’ Douglas is carrying a spanner and helping an operator and service technician do some maintenance before they head up to the next skid to test-drive the new Sumitomo 5040 processor. So far, Ross is impressed: “It’s just heaps faster man, the previous one we traded, we had done 10,000 hours on it. The PFS cab on this new one is really good, the PFS air-con in the roof is brilliant. We have their new cabs on a few of our machines now and the air conditioning is so good that when you hop out of them in summer you are shocked by how hot it is outside and have to start removing layers. The one in the 5040 is a lot quieter now too so they are improving things for the operators as time goes by.”
For more on the Sumitomo 5040 get your copy of the October 2022 issue of NZ Logger, on sale 3 October. Check the link on this page to subscribe to either a printed or digital copy (or both).
