A skidder drags stems or logs to a landing rather than carrying them. That makes it faster and simpler than a forwarder in the right conditions, at the cost of more soil disturbance and more contamination of the wood.
Skidders remain highly relevant to tree-length and full-tree harvesting, particularly where a feller buncher is producing large bunches and a landing has the processing and loading capacity to keep up.
Skidders remain central to full-tree and tree-length harvesting in Australia, where a feller buncher produces bunches and a processor works at the landing. Their appeal is speed and simplicity; their cost is soil disturbance and wood contamination.
Skidder sizing is the clearest example of the bottleneck principle in practice. Extraction capacity converts to revenue only if the landing can process and load what arrives. Where it cannot, a larger skidder simply builds a bigger pile.
Configuration choice — four-wheel grapple, six-wheel, cable, swing-boom or clambunk — follows terrain and extraction distance rather than preference. Six-wheel machines dominate where distances are long and flotation matters.
Indicative published manufacturer and distributor figures. Confirm every specification, lift chart and hydraulic requirement with the manufacturer or authorised dealer before purchase.
A six-wheel skidder representing the high-production end, positioned for high-volume and longer-distance extraction.
| Power | ~212 kW |
|---|---|
| Operating weight | ~25.1 t |
| Grapple options | up to ~2.32 m² |
| Maximum grapple opening | 3.835 m |
| Top speed | 23 km/h |
| Ground clearance | ~710 mm |
Full published specifications, commercial fit, and what to verify before signing — for each machine.
These are the numbers that determine whether the purchase works. Specification sheets rarely contain any of them.
Assemble every one of these before contacting a supplier. Any line you cannot answer is where your commercial risk sits.
Each of these is a documented pattern, not a hypothetical.
Purchase price is the smallest part of most forestry equipment decisions. These are the variables that decide what the machine costs per unit of saleable production.
Tyres and chains are typically the largest single consumable on a skidder, and trail condition drives them harder than hours do. Fuel follows gradient and trail quality more than machine specification.
The hidden cost is trail construction and maintenance, which rarely appears in machine comparisons but materially affects both productivity and compliance.
Model these against your own contracted hours rather than accepting a generic hourly rate — the machine cost calculator works the arithmetic with your figures, and the bottleneck analyser shows whether the machine is the constraint at all.
The same machine class suits very different businesses in very different configurations. These are the situations that recur.
Specification sheets are written for global markets. These are the factors that change the answer here.
None of these are proof of a bad supplier. All of them are reasons to keep asking.
Any line you cannot answer is where your commercial risk sits. Take this to the supplier meeting.
The comparisons, buyer profiles and fleet packages that turn on this machine.
Highest-throughput felling in the full-tree system — cut, accumulate, bunch, repeat.
Carries cut-to-length logs completely off the ground — payload × trips per hour is the whole economic model.
Geometry beats size — the grapple should be selected according to material flow.