There's been some heavy equipment sounds coming from an area about 1/3 mile from us. The sounds have been for a couple of months, and are excavator related. Well, recently, the sound changed. I listened carefully and came to realized it was a wood chipper. A big wood chipper. I was unable to pay the site a visit right then, but I did the next day. Coming up the hill - feller/buncher on left, chipper on right. The chipper has a huge front chute, that was blowing chips into the back of an 18 wheeler Saved from chipping The wood people were not there when I was, so I was not able to inquire about the logs. The chipper and feller buncher were taken away later that day. There were some people that were running a mobile drill. There's been several blasts of ledge, over the past few days. Time to take another walk and check it out.
There might have been a feller-buncher at the site at one point, but the machine pictured is a log loader with slasher, and not a feller-buncher. A feller-buncher typically travels through the woods and grabs the tree, fells it, and may/may not, limb and cut the wood up into lengths. The machine pictured is a log loader, that lifts the wood, drops it into a big saw that bucks the logs up into specified lengths. The big buzz saw is called a Slasher. The tops would have been fed into the chipper for clean up. Since it looks like just a lot clearing job, they might have just hand-felled the trees and moved the wood into piles for slashing and chipping with the log loader, and not used a feller-buncher. If you were around when the feller-buncher was operating, you would have noticed it; they are very distinctive in sound. This is a log slasher in action:
I could watch a feller-buncher work all day. There is something just so satisfying about them effortlessly move wood.
Yes, it is also amazing how fast they can load a 45' trailer! If they want, they can fill it in around 1/2 hour or less.
