I guess there isn't much call for lumberjacks anymore.

Workmans Compensation rates.

Who needs a metaphor with cool machines? Res ipsa loquitur. Gotta say, impressively sharp teeth on those saws, but it would have been even more impressive if they were sawing through dried hardwood.

Enforced equality?

I guess it's a good thing Saruman didn't have one. The Ents wouldn't have stood a chance.

Whew, that's one John Bunyan of a machine. But, hey, they still need drivers for the logging trucks.

There are lumber jacks. In Siberia. In gulags populated by North Korean slaves. Watch to the end to see where the lumber harvested goes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtlxTF_SX28

Question: Does this work for hardwood.

Story: Depression 1930s Western Pennsylvania. Family farm no longer worked as a farm as too hilly, too rocky, and too small. All the children worked on railroad, steel mill or manufacturing. Farm kept for hunting and weekends in country.

State during 1930s comes to farm and GIVES hundreds and hundreds of seedlings of black walnut and has out of work laborers plant the seedlings in regular grid pattern. Most of the seedlings survive.

Forty years pass and the trees are getting big, real big. State of Pennsylvania has forgotten why the trees were planted. Family members who own the farm have died off except for a sister and brother. Sister dies. Brother is left. His retirement is cushioned by money coming in on selective harvesting the trees. Now his widow, my aunt, who is in her 90s is benefiting from the sporadic harvest.

My father, now deceased, told me about the harvesting. Two men with a special machine cut each tree flush with the ground and debarked, cut each trunk to length, removed limbs and turned all the waste into chips. Everything except for the sawdust was removed from the land. The flush stump was ground up as well. A check soon arrived for the owner. That was in the 1990s.

Dan Kurt

.... revival of circumcision debate in 3...2...

Why aren't there any women commentors on this post?

That is exactly what the Marxist utopian drones hate. A machine that replaces "workers" and does so with extreme gusto to boot.

That machine replaces a timber faller, a limber, a marker with a tape measure and spray paint can, another man with a saw to cut lengths and about three safety personnel in bright vests.

I love the ingenuity of a free thinking people.

"Whew, that's one John Bunyan of a machine."

Cutting down The Pilgrim's Progress?

Two years ago we had our 40 acre woodlot in Maine selectively harvested. Two guys, one with a harvester like this one and another fellow on the forwarder that hauls the log out to be loaded onto the logging truck. They took 500 cords of wood and 120 cords of biomass. Our forester thinks they can come back in 15 years and harvest the same amount. The two pieces of equipment that let two men do the work that was done by 6 or 8 people 50 years ago cost $500K each.

Paul Bunyan. And his Blue Ox. Not John.

Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX

Something tells me that 'Terry' does not work in forestry, nor do any well-loved relations.

Damned dangerous job, that wood-cutting. I've known some to be killed, some crippled, and some merely injured. A few, very few, didn't even get a scratch.

But folks need that lumber.

I am that dude with the tape measure and paint can. We do our work long before the saws get there. As to the hazard for the logging crews, it is real. That's why my comment about workman's comp rate above. If an operator of one of those pieces of equipment gets out to do something look out for the rate$ to climb.

Jim, thanks for the correction. I knew that. Yes, I did.......at some point many years ago. The ox may be blue, but my face is red.

"Question: Does this work for hardwood."

Anything with a suitable trunk - poplars, alders, cottonwoods, maybe some hickory, and sycamores, it could work fine.

Most oaks, walnuts, and maples? Probably not

Weirdest porno I've ever seen, man.