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 when our Iron Test team arrives are that this grapple is an armoured vehicle.
Iron Test writer, Tim Benseman continues: “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.’ “
To read more, get your copy of the November 2025 edition of NZ Logger magazine, on sale from 3 November. Check the link on this page to subscribe to either a printed or digital copy (or both).
