Woodwise The view from the sharp end - Do it all
For many, many years now I’ve had a thought growing away at the back of my brain. It usually starts when it’s bucketing down on some dreadful site; the fire keeps going out and productivity and profit are draining away as fast as the water is running down my neck. There has to be a better way – besides, the body is getting to that age where running around all day with a chainsaw is taking its toll.

So, why not employ more blokes? Well, that works to a point, but over the years I’ve seen quite a few come and go and it was getting increasingly difficult and costly to replace them. I say ‘was’ because, since the recent collapse of UK plc, I’ve had more applications, CVs and hopeful phone calls than you can shake a stick at. Anyway, back to the ‘thought’. At each and every APF I stand and gawp at the monster harvesters laying waste to vast swathes of woodland, the highly skilled operators not even breaking sweat as they sit in their air-conditioned cabs, stereos on, racking up vast cubages with every button press.

Yes, I am profoundly jealous; that is, until I look at the price – a bit of a case of if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. Scanning the secondhand ads doesn’t help much. They are either
still too pricey, got a zillion hours on the clock or quite obviously a wreckage waiting to happen. Equally, from a practical viewpoint, one of these mighty beasts just doesn’t sit well in the Woodwise business framework. As a firm we tend to be dealing with lots of small woods, or small areas of wood, and down here in Sussex we don’t really have vast acres of production forest. There again, the thought of switching off one of these machines when the birds and bees start doing their thing fills me with horror.

So the thing evolving in my brain needs to be reasonable in cost, be easily adaptable and therefore multi purpose. It needs to be economical to run and ideally roadworthy to save on the cost of lorry movements wherever possible. On top of that lot it also needs to do the work of many and keep me in the ‘manor’ to which I yearn. In my mind’s eye I’m seeing a
tractor; after all you can’t really get a more adaptable, economical and roadworthy vehicle. We can use it for mulching, winching, chipping, towing and so on. Then on top of that we’ll slap a good crane and then dangle a small harvester head on that – brilliant, eh? Well it would be, if it was as simple as saying it! In my research over the years I’ve seen a few attempts at a similar machine. In all cases they didn’t quite fit the bill. One was so heavily
adapted that it wouldn’t be able to do anything else, another had the operator kneeling on the seat to work the crane and yet another had a slow old stroke processor on the back that still required all the trees to be manually felled. Okay, they all worked, but somehow they didn’t ring my bells.

However, times change and so did my luck. Most of you will know that I’m a great fan of the Valmet/ Valtra range of tractors; after all I’ve kept the same one for 12 years and it still looks like new – well almost. The thing is they do a reverse drive system which obviously puts
the operator’s eyes and hands back in line with the action rather than behaving like a contortionist. So imagine my delight when stooging about on the Web one evening I find that Wilsons have successfully grafted an eight-metre-reach Botex on to the roof of just such a tractor. That really got me thinking, but mostly about heads.

An awful lot of research and googling later got me looking for a short chassis – all the better for going round bendy trees. I want to do both hard- and softwood, you see. I’m also looking for a track feed which may not be as fast as rollers nor as powerful as a stroke feed, but is a good compromise between the two and, again, all the better to grip those bendy trees. Finally, it’s got to be tough but not weigh too much as I definitely want the dog in charge of the tail. As some of you will have already guessed, my search engine spat out the name Keto Harvesters as fitting the criteria and on top of that it told me that Wilsons were the agents –
well well, there’s a plan developing here.

I made a long phone call to Scotland which, although positive in terms of a tentative yes
to the possibility, also raised questions about the feasibility/costs and would require a good bit of thought before further action. I sort of cooled on the idea for a while until by good fortune a forest officer pal casually dropped into conversation that they (the Commission) were helping SEEDA (South East England Development Agency) to run a new RDPE (Rural
Development Programme for England). In layman’s terms he explained it meant there was a bit of money available if you’ve got an idea to upgrade or expand your kit collection if it will help your business.

He also came up with the number of the chap to ring. Very quickly I’m on the blower again and running through my ideas. I think they were a bit surprised as they’d expected the requests to be more along the chipper, logging machine or splitter route. It was also a sizeable chunk I was looking for, but hey it’s all got to go through several panels before approval, so in for a penny in for a lot of squids! I think that my rather bald statement that it was all very well having the other kit, but if no one is cutting the stuff economically in the
first place then what’s the point, was quite persuasive. I coupled that with the handy statement that we will help to bring previously uneconomic sites back into management,
thus improving sustainability/biodiversity.

That did the trick, or at least got me an application form for an Expression of Interest. A very simple form about me, my business and my idea. This was duly filled and sent which generated another form. This was a much more detailed application giving the costings, arguing the case for the machine and, more importantly, why we wanted the grant and how we would fund our part of the deal. Although I said it was much more detailed I don’t want to give the impression that it was difficult, particularly as our contact at SEEDA helped us through the process. During this time I had obviously been in close contact with Wilsons so that we could get the costings right and allow them the required head scratching time.

Brilliantly we got the form back stamped ‘Approved’ and shot up to Scotland for a look at the various components and to talk through the concept. Once home and feeling suitably confident we arranged a loan and paid a deposit. Naturally luck’s cruel streak came into its
own by announcing world recession, swiftly followed by plummeting interest rates just after we had arranged our loan. Then of course it was the horrible process of watching and waiting
from afar with only photos and update calls for consolation. Eventually the big day arrived and it was delivered along with the designer/engineer, Ian McCall, and Iain Wilson to guide me through the machine and its operation. After all the months of worry I have to say I started smiling as it came off the lorry and just a few weeks later I’m still beaming, despite the very steep learning curve.

So, thank you Wilsons, you did what I asked and it does what I wanted. As to running costs and output I’m still learning, but so far there seems to be a lot of wood on the deck in exchange for roughly 40 litres of red and 5 litres of veggie oil per day. I’ll give you further updates as my knowledge increases; in the meantime have a gander at the lovely pics. Ta ta. Nick Hilton