We had three transportation issues:
- transporting trees for planking out of the forest to the sawmill once we felled them;
- transporting felled trees for de-barking (those that were earmarked for the build – see later post) to the de- barking station;
- transporting the sawn planks to the drying area.
To resolve these issues we needed a few vehicles and implements:
A tractor,
A small crane,
A log dolly,
A substantial trailer.
We elaborate on the technical details of each under Tools&Jigs.
The tractor
Bessie is our tractor – an absolutely essential vehicle to pull and lift trees.
The small crane
Simon built a small crane that hitched to the hydraulics at the back of the tractor. This enabled us to lift one end of a felled tree about a meter off the ground – just enough to drag the tree to the sawmill, or out of a complicated and messy spot the felled tree landed.
The log dolly
Simon also built this very handy trolly that we used to transport felled trees for longer distances to our debarking station. Once we dragged a tree out of the forest we hitched the dolly to the middle of the felled tree in order to lever it off the ground, fasten it to the tractor and tow it away.
Transporting a log with Bessie and our log dolly in tow
The trailer
Simon also built this (!) – a heavy duty, four wheel, six meter long trailer. We initially used this trailer to load and transport Bessie from Grahamstown to the Winterberg. We then used it to transport our sawn planks to the drying area.
The length of the planks were determined by the quality of the log. The poplar tree tapers quite significantly - so to maximise the number of planks we typically cut about 2.5m to 3m planks that then stacked snug on the trailer.
