Nick
Trees & Telehandler
by
, 10-18-2016 at 12:42 PM (1866 Views)
18OCT16: Big developments this week! Finally found an affordable tele-handler not overly far from us and also committed to the trees for our garage build in Spring. After watching the auction sites for months, I found an older Lull 644-TT-34 Highlander II listed for 12K on Craigslist with a lot of maintenance and repairs already finished. Haggled over the phone for a couple days and got him down to 9k. Brother-in-law has CDL and we're renting his company's truck for 1k to go and get it this weekend. Sounds like the only upgrade I'm going to have to make is replace the current cubing forks with regular pallet forks. Those I'm already finding on Craigslist, just don't know if they will fit or not. Ronnie was big help in getting me the manual which is nearly impossible to find anymore without paying an arm and a leg. Was excited to think I was going to be able to move some of the boulders around, but after a little research found out that a 4'x 4' boulder is over 6000#. Kind of a bummer because over 50% of our boulders are bigger than that. Guess I'll save some diesel.
For the trees, we found a great guy that really knew what we were looking for and took us out to the site. Nice straight Red Pines with 18" - 24" average DBH and 16" - 20" tops. Couldn't find a better price at $ 2.50/ft ($ 100.00/ 40' log). He's guessing about $ 500 per truckload. He was thinking two loads until I mentioned that I was happy to take delivery at night or on the weekends (like they taught in class to say). He smiled and said that one truck should handle it then. LHBA class just saved me $ 500 !!! Now back to this damn model.....
Front of the stand of trees. Bigger ones are in back but couldn't get decent picture: