A guy I milled some black locust for recently asked if I'd be interested in milling some black walnut for him. I said sure. Then he shows me where the tree.
That's about 60 ft down a 3 - 4 ft incline from my car to the tree. So I told him I wanted 1/3 of the wood in exchange for getting the logs out and milling them. I have no Bobcat, etc, nor does he, so I parbuckled the first log up the slope using a winch on the back of my car. I forgot to take a photo during the actually process but if you look up parbuckling you'll see how it works. It's the same process I use to roll logs up onto my mill.
The tree is 32" at the butt. The butt log is to the left of the log you see at the left side of the photo. It tapers to 24" over the first 10 ft and then stays a nearly constant 24" up to the crotch at the right, 36 ft from the butt. The log I rolled up yesterday is 8 ft long so it will have about 200 bf of lumber in it.
The winch is a 5000 lb unit. It fits into the receiver on the back of my car and also onto my trailer for lifting logs onto it. I used to run it off the car battery using cables, but recently bought the jump starter you see in the background and it works just as well and is easier and safer to hook up.
Here's the log after I lifted it onto the trailer and shows a little better the steepest part of the grade we had to come up.
No way I would do this for most anything but walnut. Well, maybe white oak.
John
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