Homemade Feller-Bunching Head

I am looking to design a micro feller-buncher head for my log trailer. My goal is to be able to sever from the stump a 4 inch diameter tree or smaller, and load it onto my log trailer. I do not need to do anything else like limb it or process it.

To do that I want to keep everything as simple as I can as I have limited hydraulics with only one available circuit. I was thinking I could use that as the bunching part of my feller-buncher head.

That leaves me with several options to sever the tree off the stump. In the interest of simplicity, I was thinking with going with a fixed blade rather than a hotsaw or shear. However getting the dimensions right for that would seem like it would just have to be perfect.

How long of a blade would I need to cut a 4 inch tree off? Since I need to turn my felling head 90 degrees to load the tree onto my trailer, being too long will make it hard to maneuver trees in a grappling situation. I was thinking 3 feet would be perfect? Would that be enough length to sever a 4 inch tree without a lot of repetitive strokes? I think it would be tough to make it into the same kerf over and over again.

Also, what should the thickness be on the fixed blade? That too is a very fine line. If it is too small it will buckle when the loader sends it across the tree, yet if it is too thick, it creates a tough cut since the kerf is so much thicker. I was thinking 1/8" angle would work.

So what say the experts?

Here is what a fixed bladed felling device looks like for those that do not know. Mine would do the same thing except grab the tree and load it onto my log trailer.

 

This is plan one of my 2 stage system of mechanizing my firewood system. Since I use wood/coal stoves to heat my house, my idea is to use smaller sized wood (wood chunks) to get me small 4 inch diameter wood chunks. I can get this by harvesting saplings instead of big trees. The feller-buncher would get low volume saplings quickly and easily where I could haul it down to the next stage which is making a firewood chunker to process them.

My firewood chunker will of standard design, except I noticed that when people use wood with limbs and leaves on it, it really becomes fouled. My plan is to use the self-feeding feature of the chunker with a pull-thru delimber design to cut the limbs from the stem right before the sapling gets chunked up. It won't be perfect because I cannot back the tree up to really get the limbs off the sapling, but it should greatly reduce the debris in the chunked firewood just from getting the bulk of the limbs off. Those could be gathered up latter and chipped, burned in a bon fire, or hauled back into the woods for mulch.

This is my idea for the pull-thru delimber attached just ahead of the chunker pulling it through.

 

This is the firewood chunker I plan on building...

Between these two things, I should be able to fell, haul, limb and chunk wood into pieces that can be burned in my pot bellied stove; but all by being mechanized.

 

That chunker is pretty cool, but wouldn't you need to make the entire chunker like 10 x bigger than the one in the video to get pieces of wood that ate 15" or so?

I bring home a lot of "sticks" that size . I can see how that would speedup the processing sticks into firewood. It may be a bit dangerous, but it sure is slick.

 

So , I see Lodgedtree is on a mission lol

I hope these ideas help

 

And I forgot this one

 

Yeah I am kind of on a mission Dancan ! I got to see what I can find for steel, or go buy some. Katie will probably be all upset as I am sure she wants a new pair of shoes more then a feller-buncher, but she has 84 pairs of shoes and I have no feller-buncher so I might win this argument! Besides, I think my feller-buncher might be cheaper even if she does belong to a few shoe-of-the-month club's...and yes they do have them.

 

No, I would keep it the same size because for my pot bellied stove I have to have small pieces of wood anyway. It doe not make a lot of sense to me to take big trees and break them down into tiny pieces when I can just start with saplings from the beginning.

I have a lot of saplings left over from the loggers that have cleared forest into fields, so using them for something other than bulldozing them into a pile would be great. Even after those are fields, I still have saplings that grow up along the edge of my fields, so really there is an endless supply.

The problem is, big trees have a lot of mass, so you only need to cut 7 to make a cord of wood. With saplings you need to cut 200!! So I need a fast way to cut, haul, delimb and chunk that many trees. The only way to do that is mechanical logging, BUT fortunately they are small trees I am working with too.

I foresee chunked firewood as the future. It is exactly centered between that of pellets, and that of traditional firewood. It uses wood that is readily available, gives a market for thinning of healthy forests, has the convenience of burning coal, yet is sustainable because trees grow back...and saplings readily so. Unlike pellets that has similar properties, it does not take expensive equipment to produce however.

 

Well I could not find the main piece of steel I needed to build this feller-buncher so I stopped by a machine shop today (I go to church with the owner), and bought what I needed for $35. That was just a piece of channel iron and then a piece of 1-3/4 solid round bar so I can mount my grapple onto it eventually. That part will take the most work. A lot of machining, and a lot of welding as it is taking the brunt of the weight of the tree.

I was able to form the saw teeth, and get that going, but have yet to set the kerf and get the teeth sharpened. That will take a bit of time, but also is a major part of how the feller-buncher works too.

I did get a lot of it welded up today, but got quite a bit of thinking yet to do on this. Not just in forming the saw teeth, but in how I am going to mount the felling head so that I can get it to be both vertical and horizontal too, with the hydraulic cylinder that I have. I also have to re configure hydraulic hoses so that I can grip the severed tree. Still this should cost me less than $100 to build I think. Not bad considering most feller bunching heads cost $100,000!

 

It might be interesting to note that I did a little math regarding this. With a few assumptions, like taper, height and diameter; the typical sapling would yield almost exactly 1 cubic foot of firewood. That would mean it would take 128 to make a cord, or about 500 trees to heat my house per year. Considering availability and regrowth, that would be very sustainable firewood.

Not that it really matters. Growth in Maine is typically regarded as 1 cord, per acre, per year; sustainable. So it matters little if a person cuts 7 trees, 10 inches in diameter per year, but it took those trees 35 years to grow, or in a clear cut situation; the regrowth saplings are all chopped down and piled up into a pile every year...both would net 1 cord of wood.

 

I am steadily moving forward on this project, and I am making significant progress.

I had a little re-engineering to do. For some reason I thought I had the geometry right that allowed the feller-buncher head to tilt bot horizontally and vertically, but instead of tack welding it, I welded it all up and found out I was WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY off. So I had to cut that apart and reconfigure it. I got it working right now so I can fell a tree and be able to load it onto my logging trailer in one fell swoop (literally).

The straight saw blade idea did not work either unfortunately. Part of it was me; as in a front-shovel configuration instead of back-hoe configuration, all the controls are backwards. This made it hard to get a clean cut, but even then, the slightest miscalculation and the saw blade raked the tree in an upward angle instead of slicing through it. I should have seen that, but hindsight is always 20/20. So the work-around to that short term, is to bolt on a chainsaw and see how that does it severing trees. I am a bit leery of that long term only because I have a bad reputation of smashing chainsaws with equipment. Imagine a chainsaw bolted to a front shovel swinging throughout a woodlot? It does not take much to picture that being demolished in short order. Katie says to buy a cheap chainsaw and try it first.

Long term? It pretty much means going with a hot saw. It means powering it somehow with either an electric or hydraulic motor as I just do not have any extra hydraulic circuits to dedicate to a shear cylinder, or hydraulic motor. I am leaning more towards electric because it would be so much easier to do, and less costly. Still the exact plans on that are a ways off as there is a lot of extra thought to put into that.

So I will go with a chainsaw head just to test how this thing does in the woods. Here is a picture of it, minus the proper hydraulic hose lengths obviously on the bunching head. It also needs to be painted, but I have a little more welding to do on it first.

 

More pics LT! I really enjoy this type of project and have been known to do this myself.

 

Couldn't you use a diverter valve to get an extra circuit? Maybe a split on of the stabilizer circuits for a hyd. blade/motor if your "head" does not weigh too much. Even then you could (maybe) steal the right leg circuit and cut off the left side of the trailer?
I want to build a hyd saw on a pole (on the tractor or SS) for trimming my woods roads, just gotta bind the right blade and the time.

 

Maybe. I know this control valve has a power-beyond capability because as an option you can buy a valve to operate a optional boom attached winch. I am not sure though if my little 6.5 hp engine would power it all???

I know what you mean by a pole saw though. On my farm I took on "encroachment" saplings and limbs that hang out into a field with a vengeance. My farm was leased out from 1988 to 2008 when I took it over again and actively farmed it, and in some places it was 50 feet from the first row of corn to the rock wall. One field alone is 1 mile around (via snowmobile anyway), and doing the math on that, it comes to a whopping 7 acres lost! Now add up a bunch more fields!!! So I batted the limbs down with an excavator and beat back the saplings that grew up, but honestly it looked pretty bad doing that. A pole saw would be better.

 

I took this late in the day, and should have situated it better by swinging out the feller-buncher head so people can see what is feller-buncher, and what is not. This photo makes it very hard to tell.

I always get gun shy on this sort of thing because I am afraid people think my ideas are pretty crazy. Unto its own, this feller-buncher head is rather worthless, BUT with a chunker (video posted earlier), it would make for all mechanized firewood for a pot bellied stove.

 

No such thing

 

Well , here's someone's project , looks kinda like what LT wants

 

I looked at something similar, but was a feller-buncher head with a stroke delimber with splitting attachment. I really liked that and it looked easy enough to build, but was VERY slow.

I was thinking this would be my next build. It makes it a two step process granted, but very doable:

1. Use the feller-buncher to fell, then load the saplings onto my log trailer and haul down to my house
2. Use the firewood chunker to chop the trees into small chunks
3. Push chunks into the firewood shed

This is the chunker I would like to build. It is a very simple design, but is also self-feeding which is nice. I could also easily add a pull-thru stroke delimber to keep the leaves and debris out of my firewood, making the process cleaner. With the PTO shaft sticking through the bottom, it would be easy to add a conveyor so the chunks could be loaded directly into my dump trailer. I think it is an excellent way to use saplings to heat my home, especially since all my stoves burn coal. (Chunks are just coal sized wood and has appeal to me).

 

Chipper blades for a Bandit 90 should work .

 

I see that there's a US distributor for a chunker

Red Dragon Wood Choppers