Where is everyone #5

I watched that video recently. It is hard for me to listen to logging industry complaints about the difficulty of keeping one's head above water when he can afford a triaxle winch truck to pull his very expensive boat and trailer.

Also, how many loggers take their boots off to get in their truck? Or wear bling-butt pants?

He's ostensibly very successful and to each his own, but nothing like the loggers that I have been around.

 

Probably. It's definitely built to work. Trucks spec'd like that are pretty common in this part of the world. Just not all of them are that nice. I mean the freaking thing has granite floors. I have some pictures of it pulling the big hill out of Merritt about 6 or 7 years ago. I might have some of it at the truck show in Mission from later that day as well. Needs to be seen to truely appreciate it.

 

we have a different word for it down here.

 

Why Martha.....well I never...

 

Ex-con, tattoos and hanging with snoop, what did you expect?

 

The whole industry has changed a lot. Prior to the early 2000's most hauling (at least in the area we were located) was done by unionized owner ops. If you wanted in to the union you had to buy out someone. That kept the large fleets out and that meant logging contractors typically didn't own their own trucks.

In the early 2000's things shifted. Mills started closing down, unions dissolved and 5 axle rigs went the way of the dodo in favour of 7 axles. You couldn't make money on 5 axles once they started basing rates off a 7 axle setup. You could now haul 90,000 lbs of wood (payload, not total gross). Less demand for timber coupled with trucks being able to haul more and the ability for contractors to do it all themselves meant the little guy with one truck was getting squeezed out.

Today I might be able to list on one hand the number of one truck owner ops still around that area. Back in the day there was easily 30 of them.

 

Mid to later 2000's the remaining mills switched to a cut to length model and no longer wanted long logs as much. That forced a lot of guys to switch rigging from a tridrive and pole trailer to a tridrive and quad axle wagon to haul shorts.

Being a relatively new concept at the time there was hardly any used quad axle wagons on the used market. IIRC some guys were forking out $75k+ to re-rig their trucks. Had to lob a couple feet off the tailframe, different bunks on the truck, different ride pipes for the trailer to sit on when decked on the truck, different on board scale systems too I think. Lots of little things had to get reworked on the conversion.

 

I love those doors. I'd put them on my A model if I had the ambition.

 

We used to have a couple. Monster wheelbase tri-drives with 500 gallon capacity, 16 liter Cat engines. They used them to pull the 19axles.

This was back when they used to really heavy haul instead of being content to rub shoulders with TMC and Mavericks.