In the garden of EDER
Andrew Berry of Wolfenwood discusses the portable Powerwinch range from EDER.
THE Wolfenwood range includes four EDER portable Powerwinches and accessories, three of which are for forestry use, and each has a different specification of power/weight/cost. One person with a sack of rope on their back, winch in one hand and a few accessories in the other, can walk into any terrain and, so long as there is a suitable mounting point such as a tree, extract logs up to very impressive dimensions from almost any situation and over any distance.
Wolfenwood’s EDER Powerwinches can also be used to pull standing trees in the right direction when felling. This is very handy where trees have a wrong-way lean or there is uncertainty because of wind or weight distribution.
These winches have many safety and utility benefits: the throttle and clutch only engage on the capstan when the rope is pulled. The capstan stops and locks, as does the rope, as soon as pulling ceases. This way there is no danger of the pull reversing. The winch will not cut out when it tilts in use, as some other winches do.
The Lightweight PW500 weighs only 8 kg but can pull half a tonne. The Allrounder PW1200 weighs 13 kg and hauls 1.2 tonnes, but has a very competitive price. The Mighty PW1800 has a pulling force of 1.8 tonnes, which equates to 125 times its own weight of 14 kg! To illustrate this, a Larch butt twenty feet/6 m long with a central diameter of 500 mm is no problem at all over clear ground.
Each winch can double its pulling power by the addition of another mounting point and a simple pulley. It would be a very large log indeed that the 3.6 tonnes of the PW1800 would not be able to shift. Thousands of EDER winches are in use throughout Europe and the wider world, safely and reliably pulling logs out of all sorts of inaccessible places.
The EDER range has received a lot of positive feedback. One client has commented: “Having splashed out on a PW1800 winch, I wondered if it was worth it, but now I find it has opened up lots of opportunities for jobs that I previously could not have done.”
Another said: “A lot of our work is under power lines and in rivers, in very inaccessible places where we often used to struggle– with the Wolfenwood portable winch a couple of guys can get just about anything shifted from anywhere.”
The original importer of EDER products into the UK, Wolfenwood only sells EDER products and is the only company selling EDER’s entire range, which includes many chainsaw attachments.
For further information please go to www.wolfenwood.com or call Andrew Berry on 0781 317 3211.
Fletcher Stewart is new Portable Winch distributor
THROUGH mutual agreement Proclimber has recently relinquished the distribution of Portable Winch due to personal circumstances and it is now distributed in the UK and Ireland through Fletcher Stewart. Portable Winch is available through appointed outlets around the UK and Ireland, which can offer advice and service related to the Portable Winch range.
For more information visit www.fletcherstewart.com
Reach for the skyline
WHAT is thought to be the UK’s most powerful skyline extraction system has been put to good use in the Scottish Highlands, clearing over-mature conifers to make way for Caledonian Pine woodland.
The woodland restoration project at Achnashellach, part of Forestry and Land Scotland’s (FLS) 15-year steep ground harvesting programme, dealt with an isolated crop on the wrong side of a steep, inaccessible gorge.
According to FLS, getting the trees off the hill had proved too difficult and expensive for foresters. Too big to fell to recycle, they had been left untouched for many years because available extraction options cost up to ten times the value of the crop. But standing at approximately 900 m³ per ha and averaging just over 1 m³ per tree, there was an eagerness to harvest.
Alex MacLeod, for the FLS team in the area, explained: “There was no point in felling them to recycle because, with about 900 trees per hectare, that would have obscured the ground and prevented any regeneration of native species.
“Also, that number of over-mature trees represented a valuable crop so we came up with a plan to recover the trees.”
Duffy Skylining was enlisted to carry out the mammoth task. The Isle of Mull-based firm’s new large 360-degree cable crane, based on a 45-tonne Volvo digger, was said to have the pulling power to extract large trees over huge distances.
The Duffy Skylining team has been hard at work for the past nine months and the site is now nearing completion, with the final few trees being taken out by what owner, Callum Duffy, reckons might be the longest skyline extraction system in the UK. The rack spans the whole valley from side to side and carries two-tonne payloads of whole trees fully suspended over 650 m.
www.duffyskylining.co.uk
Capstan winches allow users to branch out
Dr David Morgan, technical manager at Orion Forestry, breaks down the range of capstan winches from Portable Winch.
The PCW5000 is the most popular model, and able to pull 1000 kg at the machine with the option to include pulleys to pull larger loads. It is powered by a reliable 50 cc four-stroke Honda engine, while the gearbox is sealed, maintenance-free, as simple as possible and ultra-reliable.
Customers can swap the capstan drum depending on their requirement for higher load or faster pull rate. Any length of double-braid polyester rope can be used.
The PCW3000 is based on a smaller engine, designed for 700 kg max pulls and engineered to be many kilogrammes lighter. It is ideal for extracting animals in remote locations, whether they are ponies stuck in Northern Irish bogs or red deer culled in the Highlands. For people who own woodland and need to extract firewood or valuable timber, it is ideal.
The PCW3000-LI’s petrol engine has been removed and replaced with an electric motor. Power comes from a lithium-ion battery, so it is always ready to pull with no maintenance and fast recharge times. With a max pulling power of 1000 kg, it can compete with the petrol versions on most tasks.
The standard customer for a PCW5000 is someone whose work or activity requires the extraction of timber, not as a daily task but perhaps a few days each month, transforming a job that took many days manually into a short and efficient morning’s work.
The versatility of the winch is due to its ability to anchor to any solid object and pull any load that can attach to a rope.
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