Sometimes you have to experience what’s outside forestry to understand how good we’ve got it.
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Just ask Bay of Plenty’s Joe Milne. He operated as a general roading and rural contractor for many years and says the work was even more erratic than logging, which is why he swapped into our industry.
That was eight years ago and he’s still happy with the switch, cementing his relationship with forestry recently with the purchase of two new Hyundai excavators and a LogMax processing head.
Until the new machines arrived, Joe had been relying on a second-hand Timberjack levelling cab tracked machine fitted with a Waratah 620 to do the grunt work in his harvesting operation, whilst a pair of loaders (a Hitachi Zaxis and a Kato bought at auction) fleeted and loaded the logs he cut in the woodlots that make up the bulk of his work.
But the hours were stacking up on the Timberjack and Joe was also finding the Waratah a bit small for some of the larger trees his crew was coming up against.
In the course of scouting for a replacement, Joe looked at pretty much all the brands and equipment options, but couldn’t go past the deal Porter Equipment offered him with the Hyundai R290LC-9 and LogMax 10000XT package. And he’s been so pleased with the Korean machine he added a Hyundai R250LC-9 loader a few months later.
It’s been a while since NZ Logger tested a Hyundai – the last was a R320LC-9 fitted with a LogMax 12000 processing head up in Northland a couple of years ago. That combo went quite well, so it seemed like a good idea to look at another combination offered by Porter Equipment, and Joe’s set-up provided the perfect pairing.
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