I did some machining work for a guy last winter to build one of these. It wasn’t as fancy as the one in the YouTube vid, but it did have a long reach and ran a hydraulic driven chain saw. Nice because it could prune trees fast from the ground.
All I did was the machining a 3/4" thick plate to mount the hydraulic motor and blade for him. He welded all the steel together for the arm. It cut wood pretty fast too, even though it was mostly a pruning machine.
Just some more ideas for folks reading this thread.
Our place is in East Tennessee, rural area. At the time of that quote, wooded property like this was running $3k/acre. Post Covid & inflation it’s about $6k now. I’d sooner rent a backhoe and do the work myself if I was that serious about it. The land is virgin and I thought to use it for cattle, more orchard space, or a campground (that kind of thing is very do-able here and it’s a pretty spot). The pic is a winter view from google maps. In the Spring it leafs out and you can’t even see the sky in this area; mostly oak and Beech. That area in red is the 2 acres I was talking about.
TN is a very beautiful area, much like KY. A lot of reasonable land still which is why many from CA, NY, NJ, and FL moved here and drove up prices. We were fortunate to find this particular piece. We paid about $300k for it 14 years ago (2300SF house, barn, new tractor, and 20 acres) which was high at the time. Similar homes now are well over double that now. Not a bad ROI. My wife thought I was nuts for quite a number of years.
We bought our 30 acres in southern middle TN in 1997… for 29,250.00… a bit less than 1K per acre.
Cleared 3 acres soon after getting it. Built a nice home on it in 2001… other than the home/yard space… i have filled up the rest of that 3 acres with fruit trees, berry bushes, cane fruit, vines etc. Ps… it is not comletely full yet… but getting closer.
It has 4 other nice home sites on it… and we are going to build… our empty nester / retirement home on one of those.
The others we may eventually gift to our children… or sell for extra retirement income.
Good to have options…
@ltilton … my family… my Dad… sold the timber off of 1427 acres of land in 1979-1981. It took the logging crew that long to get it all cut.
My Grandfather bought the land primarily to be our own hunting location… and we did that… hunted out there about half of my life.
Harvesting the timber did not hurt the deer population at all… in fact it grew substantially after logging.
He had it select cut… 14 inch min at the stump height… or larger.
It had some red white and chestnut oaks 36" diameter or better. Huge trees… it had not been cut in 50 years or more.
The loggers around here love the big tracks of land that they can work on for months, years.
It is hard to get them to even consider 1/4 acre or half acre of timber… even if it is nice timber like mine.
In the 1/4 acre that I am clearing…there were probably a dozen or more trees that would make saw logs… 20+ inch diameter oaks and a few others above 14 inch.
One of those 20 inch oaks… cut down and bucked into rounds (20 inch long)…and all the tree top wood cut up too… produces 2-3 facecords of firewood easily.
I sell a 20" facecord of oak firewood for 60.00
So one of those 20 inch oaks… i am getting 120.00 - 180.00 for.
Only the very small wood, limb tips below 2 inch diaameter… gets piled up and burned.
It makes some good char and ash… i gave all my fruit trees a couple shovels full last year.
If you can find a logger that will come and harvest 1/4 acre of timber… especially someone that still uses horses or mules to pull the logs out (not skidders)… that would be ideal.
I cleared an acre of dense 20-30 ft tall pine by hand and about halfway through I bought a chainsaw. Not fun but thankfully the stumps rotted out after a year.
Alaskan mills are very slow and the width of the chain results in more waste. It’s do-able, but tedious. You’ll need a chainsaw up to the task, an appropriate length bar and a chain meant for ripping. It’s pretty hard on the chainsaw as well. You could consider hiring a mobile sawyer to come out and saw your logs. You’ll find different rates for milling, either by the hour or by the board foot, and depending on how far you are from them, a possible travel fee. Time wise, this may be the way to go. You’d have your logs milled in a more timely manner and avoid the investment in equipment you wouldn’t use again. Wood-Mizer has a page on their website that allows you to seek out a sawyer that services your area: Find a Local Sawyer | Wood-Mizer USA
i feel like i should buy some land everywhere now. That’s less than what i spend on impulse buys