Our Story

We have a long history of developing unique machinery solutions to solve customer challenges dating back to the late 1980’s.  At that time, Lake States logging contractors were searching for an alternative to saw hands manually felling, delimbing, and cutting short wood logs with chainsaws.  Safety, available manpower, and productivity were always challenges, but changes in workers’ compensation insurance was the last straw that made manual harvesting too costly.  Loggers already had forwarders for skidding logs to the landing.  The missing piece to a two man-two machine system was a machine that could mechanically process a standing tree into marketable logs which the forwarder could collect and transport to trucks at the landing.  

Since the 1960’s there were different variations of cut to length (CTL) machines which attempted to solve the problem, but none profitably fit the needs of Lake States loggers.  The latest at that time was Scandinavian CTL technology which worked well in softwood species with straight boles and small limbs, but struggled to handle crooked, forked hardwoods with larger, tougher limbs.  The Scandinavian machines were also very expensive to own and operate and experienced durability problems trying to process North American hardwoods.

With the goal of improving profitability for our customers by reducing the cost per cord to produce short wood logs, we sourced a specific excavator as our base, remanufactured it for forestry use, and paired it with our own CTL processing head design.  The result was a machine that helped our customers profitably harvest all tree species in typical Northern mixed stands.  Ironically, some of the technologies used in our CTL processors years ago...rotators, head mounted proportional hydraulics, CAN bus computer controls with multi-function joysticks, and excavator interfaces/integrations, are used in the Tiltrotators we sell today.