Hu,
Lol....on the work ethic thing. Unfortunately for our generation, there was little regard to safety. If you were a 'company man' you could easily let them work you to the point were you were bent & broken. Fortunately for me I was lucky and had wanderlust....so I keep moving around the country picking up trades as a challenge. What that enabled me to do was move to the next state and so on and so forth. Loggin' I truly loved, but the bosses where simply, slavers and you were their red meat...at least the gypos. On the other hand, work for one of the big outfits like Crown Z and the pace was so slow, you wonder how they ever got any wood moved to the mills. I just got tired of chasing my check down on later Friday afternoon with the gypos, or listening to the excuses of why there wasn't enough payroll that week, or how it was "you fallers fault", etc. Too hard and too dangerous to deal with that. I almost got into horse loggin' up in northern Idaho once...but got distracted with something else.
The young fallers, they don't wanna hear the old tales...they know it all...until they're killed or maimed for life.....but then that's youth to a large degree. At least I was respectful and tried to pull all I could out of the old guys while they were still around.
I did a CL search last night for Silvey jacks....was really disappointing. Only found the backpack set with two jacks and the pumping station for $2,000! And the set-up looked really rough. I don't need anything more these days than the single jack. There were two school on tree jacks; the guys that cut a row for them and used them from the start with their back cut. And then the guys that used them if they had too. I fall into the latter category, unless I have negative lean and will start out with the jack. Of course if you were down in CA into Cypress and Redwood, you'd be in the first category.
Kevin