New Developments In Winch-Assist Technology

Winch-assist technology is now a well-established system to support forest harvesting activities on steep slopes. In the European alpine area the most common system format is a winch integrated on the forwarder or harvester to extend their operating range. In North America and the Southern hemisphere typically a winch mounted on a separate machine at the top supporting felling and shovelling work of a machine on the slope provides greater flexibility, especially in the larger plantation forests. More recently, the success and availability of both systems have seen them expand to applications such as winch-assist skidder extraction. However innovative companies and logging contractors have continued to develop the use of aspects of winch assist capability. For example, in New Zealand shovelling to pre-bunch ahead of fully mechanized cable yarder extraction is proving to be highly productive. In addition to updating new developments, this presentation will show the latest applications including examples of greatly increasing the productivity of older yarders through life skyline support, simplified rigging through tail-hold bridling, as well as applications on wet swampy terrain. Where possible, this information will be supported by productivity and utilisation values based on successful case studies.