SmalleyTimbermite timber harvester on trial
The photograph is courtesy of Tom Dow, Rhynie, who was one of the harvester operators at Buchan Forest District to try out the newly produced Smalley Timbermite base with possibly a Patu 350 harvester head around 1991-92
The Smalley Timbermite on the left is sitting beside an Atlas excavator base fitted with a Pika harvesting head and it can easily be seen that the harvester head on the Timbermite is considerably smaller than the Pika.
In the thinning trial possibly in the Rothiemay area, from memory, the machine performed quite well at cutting and processing the trees but tree size was limited. Travelling in the forest on steeper ground and getting down off road sides on slopes posed real problems. Mike Bremner one of the operators recalls the excavator appeared to have a high centre of gravity and tipped forward alarmingly when going steeply downhill and similarly backwards when climbing a slope so much so that the engine safety cut out sprang into action regularly rendering the whole system immobile.
The PDF is another image of the machine going down a slope from the forest road side.
Any further details and experiences with this machine combination would be very welcome.
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Groups: Forestry Areas, Northeast Scotland , Timber harvesters, processors, forwarders and cable cranes
2 Comments
Pika was the next level back then. Comment left on 12 May 2021 at 21:23 by Charlie Murray