Purpose-built machinery, very high annual utilisation, and profitability measured per cubic metre.
One carrier, many attachments, and revenue spread across several industries.
Attachment-based fleets moving between utilities, rail, roads, mining, solar and councils.
Measured in hectares per day — inside a window that does not move.
Paid for difficult removals done safely, not for tonnes per hour.
The one group whose fleet decision must follow a signed offtake agreement.
Specification sheets answer one question: what can this machine do in an hour? That is the right question for exactly one kind of business — the one whose revenue is a function of hourly throughput on a site it does not have to leave. For everyone else, the figure that decides profitability sits somewhere the brochure does not go.
A plantation contractor is constrained by contracted annual hours and by which machine in the chain stops production when it fails. A land-clearing contractor is constrained by the carrier lift chart and by how many unrelated industries the asset can earn in. A vegetation-management contractor is constrained by where the asset owner permits the machine to stand. An establishment contractor is constrained by a planting window that does not move. An arborist is constrained by a gate. A biomass contractor is constrained by a specification someone else wrote.
Those are six different machines being described by the same set of numbers. Working out which constraint binds your business is the step that makes every subsequent comparison meaningful — and skipping it is how well-specified machines end up being the wrong purchase.
Most businesses recognise themselves in one row. Some sit across two, which usually means the fleet has to serve both constraints rather than splitting the difference.
Buy purpose-built machines that do one job extremely well. Production per hour is high and the cost per tonne or per cubic metre is low — provided the hours are there. The machines have few alternative uses, so the whole case rests on utilisation that can be underwritten in advance.
Characteristic of plantation harvesting, and of biomass operations working against a firm offtake agreement.
Buy a carrier and attach capability to it. No single task is performed as efficiently as a purpose-built machine would perform it, but the asset earns across several industries and stays saleable to buyers outside forestry. Utilisation risk is spread rather than underwritten.
Characteristic of land clearing, vegetation management and arboriculture, and of establishment contractors working short seasonal windows.
Cut-to-length and full-tree, and why the silviculture chooses the system rather than the other way round.
The worked models behind depreciation, cost per hectare and cost per cubic metre.
The utilisation threshold where ownership starts to beat hire, and what sits on either side of it.
Worked fleet configurations for specific kinds of work, with the bottleneck identified in each.
Every class covered in the guide, with the commercial case and the limitations of each.
What to ask and what to look at before committing to a specific machine.