When Montana forester Craig Thomas bought newly developed bins and bunks for hauling his wood products, he had them painted bright green.
"Craig is a pilot, so he said he wanted to be able to see them from the air," Craig Rawlings explains.
Rawlings, a smallwood specialist from the Montana Community Development Corp., recently showed off some of the innovative ways Thomas is hauling logs and slash these days.
With stiff clean-air standards, anti-burning sentiment and new uses for wood waste, efficient transportation of woody materials is key. The accompanying goal is to encourage better forest management methods and develop expanded markets.
"They've borrowed the hook-lift idea from the garbage industry," said Rawlings, who has long been involved in smallwood utilization concepts. "They can haul out 30 tons of product with this system of bins, and they can load it with a little farm tractor. The system can go either way, with big contractors or small landowners."
The large bins are corrugated for added strength, Missoula fabricator Lonnie Marquardt said. Marquardt fabricated both the bins and hook-release style bunks so the two can interchange, allowing one truck to haul mixed loads of logs and wood waste in one trip. The long-time Missoula fabricator also develops a line of small road graders that can fit on Bobcats for use by owners of small properties.
"The bins stack inside each other when empty, so one truck can haul up to six empties," Rawlings said of the mix-and-match type containers. "It's a faster transportation system, and the trucks don't have to wait on loads. It can adapt to little contractors trying to do good work in the wildland urban interface. If you're only doing 2 to 5 acres, nobody wants to burn the materials, because the risk is too high. You could burn a house down. In dog-hair thickets, there's too much material to put back on the ground. This way, you can use different tools for different projects, and with all these tools, you can have better forest project management."
The roll-on, roll-off bins or bunks easily slide onto the truck bed or a pup trailer using a basic hook apparatus. The trailer, in this instance, also has a tongue that lies flat on the ground, making it easier for the truck to back right up to the trailer.
That makes the driver's job easier. The combination bin-bunk system allows one truck to ferry varied loads of logs to different sites for different applications.
In the case of wood wastes, Rawlings is hammering out details for a central storage site in Stevensville. Other wood wastes are currently contributing to the Fuels for Schools program, which has taken hold in the Bitterroot Valley and at western Montana schools.
Nora McDougall-Collins, who also works for the Montana Community Development Corporation, says the flexibility of the bin and bunk transport system has special appeal to smaller contractors who only have one truck available. She said the Rosebud-Sioux tribe in South Dakota has already inquired about the system.
Rawlings, who had a hand in funding the bin and bunk system, said that he teamed up with Thomas because he already had an established track record, and had put some of his own funding into development.
Both Thomas and Rawlings are action-oriented in terms of finding better ways to handle slash, and continue to look for additional markets for woody byproducts. A fresh eye toward biomass for energy production is one facet of the ongoing research, as is the developing market for wood composites.
"Our whole approach is to get things done," Rawlings said. "What we do here is always action oriented."Small Wood News
