clearing?

[treeman82]

So I have a 1 ton chip dump and a 12" chipper with winch. The bulk of my business is mature shade tree pruning and mixed removals on high end properties. The closest I get to land clearing is expansion of a lawn, or clearing for a vista... typically no more than a few thousand square feet, or less than 30 trees. This year I got dragged into a couple of clearing jobs by some friends with backhoes who feel that my 1090XP is a whole tree chipper. We just came off a job yesterday afternoon where the chipper was getting dragged around the site by a backhoe or excavator due to mud and hills. After inspecting it later in the day I observed that the front end of the chipper had been beat up... plug receptacle busted, chains messed up, jack banged up... and I know my blades are trashed after dragging crap through the mud.

I feel that it's in my best interest to stay away from these types of sites, I'm not equipped for it, and for the money I could charge my time would be better spent elsewhere considering the beating that gets put on the equipment.

How do you guys approach these types of jobs?

 

[mattfr12]

Ive never had to chip anything on a land clearing job yet usually pushed it all in a pile stumps and brush and burned it. when they added on the the airport out here they dug a hole and put gas and oxygen lines into it and lit it up and pushed all the crap into that. feeding a 12 inch chipper with a excavator or backhoe will beat it up. i guess if they paid enough it would be worth it. i need a new winch on my machine from it being beat around with an excavator.

 

[treeman82]

Around here burning requires a permit, and it's typically not worth the effort unless the junk you want to get rid of is really junk.

Historically speaking when people ask me if I'm interested in looking at clearing jobs I politely tell them no. Been on several clearing jobs for other people in the past where I remember seeing 18" chippers get stuffed with track loaders.... not my machine. Did one for myself many years back, took a financial beating on that one... makes me shy away from them. Just wondering what the guys who have been in my shoes years back have done, and how it worked out for them.

 

[imagineero]

I only do clearings of small sites, usually commercial places where they want to build an office on undeveloped land, a housing site, or at most a small apartment block. I do it with a buddy who has an 18" bandit with a winch. I pay him an hourly rate, and I only accept the contracts based on doing all the felling myself (ie. no dozers etc). We fall so trees can be dragged into the chipper with the winch and minimise dragging. I price them fairly high, and dont win many. That's just fine by me. With these sorts of contracts I find theirs too much competition and no money for the winner, plus usually delays in getting payment and occasionally no payment at all. I've seen guys wait 6 months for payment from developers or other big companies. I like cash on the day.

I wont do machine cleared sites. As already mentioned, too much dirt, muck and hard work for equipment. A chipper isn't heavy plant, it's not a dozer or excavator, and most guys who operate those types of plant cant seem to understand that. Chippers need care in their use if you want them to last. No way would I consider taking on clearing contracts with a 12". Unless the trees are all tiny, you'd be ripping logs till you're blue in the face.

Shaun

 

[capetrees]

If you can make your money elsewhere, why do this type of work? High end tree removal and pruning is probably more lucrative that land clearing, no? I priced a job once where a competitior beat me by half and he was used to doing this type of work. I rarely do it anymore considering others are equipped for that type of work. Didn't seem to be any money in it. (I posted it in here some time ago. He got the job, $18 per tree/100 trees, all 8" pines x 100' tall. Keep it.)

As far as the abuse on the machine, if the trees can fit in the chipper, it's made to do just that, chip wood. I've never seen a limit on what a machine can do in a day in the manuals so have at it. I would never allow my machine to dragged around by and excavator or other machine due to what you've just experienced with the damage. Anytime I've been clearing a lot, the trees, logs and brush all come to me picked off the ground by an excavator or bobcat (clean) and brough to the closest work spot. It takes more time but the other option is taking it all to the dump and that's more money for the clearing crew.

Bottom line is if you feel comfortable with the money you make and can replace worn items on the machine (blades), go for it. Just don't beat yourself and machine to a point that it is all downhill.

 

[imagineero]

Any machine only has a limited number of hours before death, but when I was talking about wear on the machine what I meant was more about the crap that these guys will try to feed into your chipper. Like most guys, I wont chip palm, vines, root balls, dirt, rocks etc... but will take any volume of clean wood.

With land clearance jobs you do get the ones where they've dozered the trees, then dozered the whole lot into one big tangle of mud, rocks, vines etc and may also have thrown timber or other demolition waste into the pile. If you're hand feeding, you can go through it all and pick the crap out, but these are often machine fed jobs, and sometimes the customer wants to do the feeding themselves.

Shaun

 

[tree MDS]

Loggers gotta eat too.

I say leave it to the loggers. Residential tree services really have no business bidding on that kind of work. We're simply not equiped for it and it turns into a joke every time. Kinda like someone going after treework with a lawn mower. lol.

 

[Bigus Termitius]

Ouch. Yeah, I don't let anybody drag my chipper around.

When it comes to land clearing, I'll gun a saw for hire, but that's it. If they need it chipped why not bring in a tub to keep up with the heavy equipment instead of bottlenecking my poor chipper, right?

 

[capetrees]

Right, portable tub grinder is the way to go if they've bulldozed it into a tangled pile of debris. And theres no way I'm letting the customer do the feeding, thats my machine and I (or the help) will do the feeding.

 

[sgreanbeans]

I do alot of this stuff, On the big projects, I hand them over to my buddy who has all the right stuff, all he does. He has the biggest Morbark tub available. Its awesome watching that thing eat. On the small stuff, we dont mess with chipping, we just load it into the dumps and haul it off, maybe alot of trips, but it is alot easier that trying to separate the stuff. Then we leave the stumps about 3' high, the developer then has a excavator pop them out. We load those up too, haul them to the tub grinder. On the forest thinning jobs, we do them no diff than any other tree job. Get the small ones first to get them outa the way. We have to tread lightly on those, the other guys go in and tear up the soil real bad, trying to change the grade, destroying the roots of the ones to remain. We establish lanes that the machine cannot leave, we bring the materiel to it. Reducing the impact.

 

[48"BAR PINCHER]

So I have a 1 ton chip dump and a 12" chipper with winch. The bulk of my business is mature shade tree pruning and mixed removals on high end properties. The closest I get to land clearing is expansion of a lawn, or clearing for a vista... typically no more than a few thousand square feet, or less than 30 trees. This year I got dragged into a couple of clearing jobs by some friends with backhoes who feel that my 1090XP is a whole tree chipper. We just came off a job yesterday afternoon where the chipper was getting dragged around the site by a backhoe or excavator due to mud and hills. After inspecting it later in the day I observed that the front end of the chipper had been beat up... plug receptacle busted, chains messed up, jack banged up... and I know my blades are trashed after dragging crap through the mud.

I feel that it's in my best interest to stay away from these types of sites, I'm not equipped for it, and for the money I could charge my time would be better spent elsewhere considering the beating that gets put on the equipment.

How do you guys approach these types of jobs?

Whole tree chipper or if it's piled ( which is stupid and a waste of time and fuel) I use a 65K# Link Belt excavator with a hyd thumb or rotating grapple to load a 14' Morbark tub grinder. Chips get blown into a 53' walking floor trailer. Then stumps get loaded into grinder and do the same. Any debris that can't get ground up gets loaded into dumps and hauled away. Your best bet is finding a local outfit that can handle that work and talk shop to see if you throw them some work if they will use you as labor to help them out bucking logs etc.. to fit in the grinder. There is a reason most land clearing equipment looks so banged up as you have found out......

 

[treemandan]

So I have a 1 ton chip dump and a 12" chipper with winch. The bulk of my business is mature shade tree pruning and mixed removals on high end properties. The closest I get to land clearing is expansion of a lawn, or clearing for a vista... typically no more than a few thousand square feet, or less than 30 trees. This year I got dragged into a couple of clearing jobs by some friends with backhoes who feel that my 1090XP is a whole tree chipper. We just came off a job yesterday afternoon where the chipper was getting dragged around the site by a backhoe or excavator due to mud and hills. After inspecting it later in the day I observed that the front end of the chipper had been beat up... plug receptacle busted, chains messed up, jack banged up... and I know my blades are trashed after dragging crap through the mud.

I feel that it's in my best interest to stay away from these types of sites, I'm not equipped for it, and for the money I could charge my time would be better spent elsewhere considering the beating that gets put on the equipment.

How do you guys approach these types of jobs?

I would check out the tounge real good and find out why the other stuff had to to beat to ####. What kind of moron wouldn't tie that stuff up? Don't answer, I allready know. Chipper gets pulled with a pintle clasp and nothing else.

 

[Guido Salvage]

Do what you know and know what you do....

 

[Rholmes]

most people think lot/land clearing is easy,straight forward work. its actually the opposite. if you are not equipped with the right equipment it is the most labor intensive, ball busting type of tree work.not to mention that unless it is truly a tiny bit of land,chances are you will get severly underbid by a outfit that specializes in clearing.

 

[superjunior]

I'll rent if its beyond my equipments capabilities. I have a whole tree chipper and will take on some smaller land clearing jobs.
the bigger ones I'll hire a land clearing company that can do the work for a lot less then it would cost me, so in those cases I'll make a couple $k for simply doing the estimate and the paperwork

 

[mattfr12]

I'll rent if its beyond my equipments capabilities. I have a whole tree chipper and will take on some smaller land clearing jobs.
the bigger ones I'll hire a land clearing company that can do the work for a lot less then it would cost me, so in those cases I'll make a couple $k for simply doing the estimate and the paperwork

around here you can get around 5500.00 per acre. and yes i rent some of my stuff also i go to RSC and get a small dozer and excavtor with grapple on it they drop it off and pick it up. last time we rented it for a month for 5.5 acres and it wasnt real bad i think the dozer was a john deere and was like 1700.00 and the excavator was around the same. dont quote me on the price tho may be a littler more but i know it wasnt 2 grand. so 3/4 of an acre was equipment rental. to me i thought it was good money on how long it took with the right machinery you can do it pretty fast. i wanna say it took around 12-15 days with 5 guys. thier building some kind of park thier now.

if your going in thier with a chainsaw and a chipper it would be a wast of time that kobelco excavator was like 25k pounds it threw those trees around like tooth picks.

we just dropped everything picked out the trunks pushed all the other crap in piles and burned it. came back a few days later once it was done burning and scoped up the rest of the junk with a bobcat and trucked it out. made about 50 truck loads down to 2-3

 

[superjunior]

if your going in thier with a chainsaw and a chipper it would be a wast of time that kobelco excavator was like 25k pounds it threw those trees around like tooth picks.

so true. I've learned this the hard way

 

[Rholmes]

going rate around where i am is around 850 a acre,clear cut. not grubbed though. i was talking to the owner of a large land clearing outfit a while back and he told me they can do 20 acres a day average...hard to compete with that.

 

[mattfr12]

going rate around where i am is around 850 a acre,clear cut. not grubbed though. i was talking to the owner of a large land clearing outfit a while back and he told me they can do 20 acres a day average...hard to compete with that.

you would have to have some big time equipment and man power to do 20 acres a day and at 850 an acre i dont see how you could make it. on axe men most of those big logging companies such as swamp loggers and so on arnt clearing 20 acres a day.

an average felling machine is a few hundred grand
skidder another few hundred grand

around here to rent a forestry mower runs around 1200 a day for the small one.

depends on what they mean by 20 acres also if its all brush and small trees ya a decent sized forestry mower will rip right through it

heavily wooded that would be alot.

 

[lxt]

Actuall Matt.....the going rate around here is right around $850.00 an acre, this doest count residential or estate settings, I bid a job for the Pa game commision as did many other companies, I think it was a 60+ acre 9 plot job......winning bid was $7800.00 yeah $7800.00...........many of the other companies (Pa based) talked to me as this job was in Darlington PA (very close to me) & we just couldnt imagine how a company from Minnesota???? was gonna do this job for that kinda money!

This was all hand cutting too by the way, strip mines, canyons, shale rock hillsides, etc... you had a deadline involved & the start date was right when we got hit with that 2-3ft of snow in 2010, I stopped by a couple months ago to check it out as I was doing some utility surveying for 345 lines...........well lets say the game comminsion got what they paid for!!!! coulda did better with a steiner lawn mower...!

when I hear lot clearing........I go check it out, there is a line I try to stay within for the job to be profitable, alot of times homeowners think removing 10-15 trees is lot clearing..........where I consider acres as land/lot clearing!



LXT...............