The Infamous Feller Buncher

Since nobody has talked about feller bunchers yet, I will. This is a large feller buncher:

Image from John Deere (www.deere.com) wallpaper gallery

It accomplishes two tasks: cutting the trees off at the base and bunching them together before laying them on the ground in piles. This allows it to cut multiple trees in one pass. The process looks something like this:

 

 Feller buncher in action: if you skip through the video you can see it from a variety of angles

The specs for the machine are impressive: a John Deere 959K has a 9.0L diesel engine producing 330 horsepower and 1027 foot pounds of torque (for comparison the 2.0L engine in a Jetta Sportwagen TDI produces 120 hp and 236 ft-lbs torque). It has a top speed of 2.2 mph which seems paltry until you take into account that it is 13 feet tall, has a 285 gallon fuel tank, and weighs 82,850 lb. All of this power and bulk allows it to pick up 18,330 pounds of tree at the full reach of its arm (it has a 29.3 ft cutting radius). I should note that my pictures and specs are for a large feller buncher with a long cutting arm: smaller feller bunchers without arms, like the one mentioned in Schneider, are available. Still, feller bunchers are one of the more fuel hungry logging machines according to a report I found (see below), consuming an average of 26.2 liters per hour (6.92 gallons per hour) while working. There was a standard deviation of 9.5 liters per hour (2.51 gph) due to differing terrain and types of trees.

However, this is not the only big machine that is used for logging.There are delimbers, harvesters, skidders, chippers, firewood processors, and many more machines all made by a variety of manufacturers and employing quite a few people in their upkeep. Below are a couple more videos if you are curious:

Delimber: this machine removes limbs from trees and cuts them to length:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0HxwOHfueI
Harvester: this machine seems to be more capable than the delimber at moving trees around and cutting them into pieces, but wouldn't be as well suited to working with trees with a lot of limbs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMQvBwMKeHM&list=UU6piF0a9laW7Lny7Qw4jAYA
The firewood harvester (my favorite), cuts and splits logs:

I couldn't resist putting in the video...don't bother with the boring specs at the beginning, fast forward to the cool stuff

Looking purely at what these machines can do, they are pretty neat: they are capable of doing the work of many people in half the time and provide a safe work environment for their operators. So I would argue that the machines deserve some respect for what they can do, even if sometimes we disagree with what they are used for.

Citation for paper:

Smidt, Mathew and Tom Gallagher. "Factors Affecting Fuel Consumption and Harvesting Costs." Auburn School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, n.d. Web. 22 September 2014. web1.cnre.vt.edu/forestry/cofe/documents/2013/Smidt_Gallagher.pdf