Towards the end of 2023, Richard Court Forestry Engineering hosted an exhibition and demonstration of machinery near its base in Surrey to showcase its range to potential and existing clients from across the world of timber harvesting. Forestry Journal was in attendance.
FOR a couple of days in late autumn, Field Place, deep in the Surrey countryside, was the venue for an active timber harvesting demonstration. A shuttle minibus transported visitors the few miles from Hascombe Woodyard, the base of operations of Richard Court Forestry Engineering.
Richard and Alisa Court set up the business in 2000, the venture becoming a limited company in 2003. For almost two decades, Richard was a regular exhibitor at forestry and woodland shows and events around the country. They were, however, becoming increasingly expensive and hauling a representative range of kit and machinery onto site for a few days was a very stressful and time-consuming undertaking.
When COVID-19 brought the events calendar to a sudden halt, Richard decided that in future interaction with foresters and woodland contractors would take place at Hascombe Woodyard, where a full range of equipment would be on display. A local timber harvesting site could be made available for a live demonstration of machinery in action.
Alisa Court had taken charge of organising the open days. Registering the visitors, dealing with the needs of the exhibitors and the contractors, as well as ensuring a steady throughput of passengers on the shuttle from the static to the working sites all enhanced the smooth operation of the event. In the early days, Alisa had been involved in the administration of the business, despite being a full-time teacher.
With the arrival of a family, Alisa’s involvement increased. Eventually, she ended up handling the finances while, by her own account, building up a sound base of forestry knowledge. When Richard Court Forestry Engineering started to support John Deere Forestry at Carlisle, providing service operations for customers in the south of England, Richard and Alisa agree the company seemed to turn a corner.
The arrangement has matured over the years to the mutual benefit of both parties and the relationship has set a benchmark standard for the Surrey-based company’s interactions with other dealers and suppliers. It is not envisaged the operations at Hascombe Woodyard will be expanding much in the future. The team is settled and onsite service visits, machinery sales and workshop repairs and fabrications have dovetailed together very well in the present form.
The next step for the business is to work towards ISO 9001 accreditation. Focusing on management and standards, many concerns report that compliance with the accreditation has brought down costs and increased revenue. For Richard Court Forestry Engineering, it will inspire confidence with the high-profile public and private sector organisations that their customers deal with.
John Deere service manager Ben Clark covers southern Scotland, England and Wales. Having Richard Court integrating with his own service engineers has worked out very well for the machinery producer. With 14 service vans and five workshop technicians (at Carlisle and Perth), the north is well catered for. The forestry engineering business at Hascombe Woodyard, with its own base-load of fabrication, dealerships and service contracts, is ideally suited to cover southern England for John Deere Forestry contracts and occasional service requirements.
Paul Williams, John Deere Forestry Southern Sales, was able to report that the business – in late 2023 – had only one machine remaining without a customer’s name on it. Sales have been surprisingly resilient considering the economic headwinds businesses have been facing over the last year. The timber is still there to be cut and hauled and John Deere machines continue to handle a good proportion of it.
Richard Court Forestry Engineering is the UK dealer for both Waratah and Moipu harvesting heads. Both companies sent delegations from Finland to attend the event at Hascombe Woodyard. Waratah’s global general manager for distribution, Heather Robinson, actually flew in from the US to start a business tour of Europe. Heather views the European market for Waratah attachments as stable, with increasing sales in France and Germany. Take-up in Scandinavia remains limited.
For Waratah, the greatest potential market remains South America – notably Brazil, Paraguay and Chile. Expanding eucalyptus plantations are driving pulp mill construction on the subcontinent and the material is already finding its way across to European papermakers. Metsä Group’s new pulp mill in Kemi, Finland, will use mainly Finnish timber, but access to the port has been dredged to accommodate big vessels laden with South American eucalyptus.
Family engineering firm Moisio Forest Oy produces the Moipu range of harvesting heads. The first – the Moipu 700 – was produced in the 1980s. The turn of the century saw the introduction of the E series energy harvesting heads. The new factory, opened in Viitasaari, central Finland, in 2010, now also specialises in innovative feed-roller design and manufacture.
Dutch/German attachment manufacturer Vosch produces specialised attachments for the controlled dismantling of trees, as well as ranges of stump grinders and forestry mulchers. The grapple saw attachments range from the 1500-7T HD (for 9–11-tonne carriers) through to the 2200-7T (for 28–40-tonne base machines). The company’s Aloys van Osch explained that the range had been developed with customers’ experiences in mind.
Instead of supplying a mix of existing machinery and attachments to forestry and tree-work contractors, Vosch decided to design and build the grapple saw attachment from scratch, allowing for the inbuilding of an extremely high standard of strength and resilience. The characteristics of the most suitable carriers – the Sennebogen rubber-tyred range were expected to be among those in most demand – were taken into account at all stages of the development.
The new Vosch 50 Series grapples, available with or without a saw, are the latest upgraded versions. The two VC models are equipped with the innovative Vosch Control hydraulic system. The grapple’s own valve block operates from a CAN BUS control link directly from the carrier’s electronic systems. The common problem of adding a third hydraulic circuit to the machine is avoided. Aloys van Osch remembers that Richard Court took the Vosch stumpgrinder first; he was soon persuaded that he really needed the grapple. It has been a win-win situation both for the dealer in Surrey and for the manufacturer on the Dutch/German border.
Sany UK and Ireland is based in Coatbridge in Scotland’s Central Belt. The heavy equipment manufacturer was founded in China in 1989, but now also has manufacturing and research and development facilities in India, Brazil, Germany and the USA. Despite development of record-breaking mobile crawler cranes (3600T) and massive vertical-reach concrete pumping systems (over 600 m) the Sany excavator range remains a mainstay product line of the global business.
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Top-quality machines at affordable prices have meant the brand is making significant inroads into the UK and Irish construction fleets. The mini-range machines, according to Neil Tilley, national service manager, are perfect for light groundwork operations, but the mid-sized machines were turning out to be ideally suited for timber work. The SY80 and the SY135 had been drafted in for operations on the woodland demonstration site.
The team from Clark Engineering, Parkgate, Dumfriesshire, with the firm’s innovative forestry engineering solutions, completed the round-up of exhibitors at Hascombe Woodyard. Clark’s G-series on-site fuelling systems, site safes and toolstations have consolidated their position on the timber harvesting site. The Powerhand grab and grapple attachments represent the development of almost 100 years of forestry engineering at Parkgate. Married with Clark-designed links and Indexator rotators, full, smooth control of the attachments is assured.
As well as the forestry PPE, the measuring and marking equipment and the woodsman’s sundries that the business has supplied to SW Scotland timber cutters for years, online sales have extended the offering nationwide. Another fairly new development is the Markusson automatic harvester chain-sharpening system. If the investment appears at first a little costly, one timber contractor running two harvesters has confirmed the outlay was repaid in six months. After that, the benefit was the extra hours the heads were cutting timber in the wood.
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