Europeans always have more refined names for stuff than we do, seemingly. Here? We call machines like this log skidders, the machines designed to drag felled trees out of their natural habitat and to an area where they can be loaded onto trucks and transported to a sawmill for processing. Over there? They are called “Forwarders”. Both of them do the same job and in the case of this video starring a Logset 6F forwarder, we’d be hard pressed to argue that any machine does it better than this one. With a two speed transmission (slow and slower) and a 7.4L AGCO diesel engine, this thing goes through the depths of sloppy, nightmarish mud and gives zero Fs about it…at all.
The magic behind this combo seems (to us, anyway) to be the trailer which uses a track system that’s wrapped around the big tires holding it up off the ground. With a driveshaft coming from the tractor and spinning those tracks in the rear, it is both pushing and pulling itself mud that would probably swallow any other rig that tried to go through it whole. This thing just plods along, almost gracefully.
This is one of those machines where power is kind of secondary in many ways. The AGCO engine makes 230hp and 700 ft/lbs of torque. Not small numbers but not overwhelming, either. They can be optioned with lifting cranes up to 32ft long and the base weight of the sucker is 14 tons.
It may be slow but holy heck does this look like a fun challenge to take on!
Impressive rig. You will often see skid steers with tracks wrapped around tires. They enable traction and flotation which you gotta have in the gumbo. It’s a tribute to the super low gearing that allows the drive wheels on the tractor to not spin.