Features Equipment & Systems Paper
Port Hawkesbury Paper adds log handler to woodyard

“This new machine is identical to the first: an 830 M-T, Tier III trailer puller,” reports Port Hawkesbury Paper’s Dennis Boulet. He praises the machine’s pulling capabilities, handling, and power. “We are using both Sennebogens to do numerous tasks around the yard,” Boulet says, “but the biggest benefit of those machines is their towing capacity.”
PHP’s new 830 has taken over most of the yard’s trailer-pulling duties, loading and moving a 60-ton (132,000 lb) trailer to the mill’s infeed deck. Hauling two truckloads of wood at once through the paved yard is a tough duty, with a 12-m rise from the lower mill area to the upper stock area. The drive system of the 830 M-T is custom-engineered for this kind of work.
“It lifts high for our deck, which is 18 ft. (5.5 m) at the low end. It has almost 15,000 hours on it in two years. I never see it shut down – it runs 24 hours most days,” says Boulet.
Meanwhile, the original 830 is reassigned to other tasks in various parts of the yard. It’s often at work restacking the biomass piles, where PHP stocks random-length wood to supply fuel chips to Nova Scotia Power. “We stock the wood and dry it for approximately a year. We try to keep a 60-day supply of pulpwood in store to get us through the road-closure season. April to May are our major reclaim times for pulpwood,” says Boulet.

High reach facilitates restacking
“What’s nice about its reach and power is, we can go where the truckers put a couple of piles down, pull up on the outside of the piles, then pick off the near tier and reach over it to stack higher on the tier behind,” explains Boulet. “We’re stacking two tiers deep. The 830 is reaching in 30 ft. (9 m) and the pile is 26’ (8 m) high, so you can imagine the strain on the machine. But it doesn’t have any trouble – we’ve had very little downtime with these two machines.”
The strength and precision of the 830 M-T is also lending a hand to PHP’s management of the fuel wood. “We’re doing some tarping trials now, using the 830 to stretch tarps over the stockpile.”

Focus on reducing downtime
To learn more about his two workhorse machines, Boulet recently took the opportunity to visit Sennebogen’s facilities near Charlotte, N.C., with Strongco Equipment’s Terry Picard. Boulet was most impressed by the size and depth of the parts inventory maintained at the 9,300 m2 facility. “You call for an axle,” he says, “and it’s on a flight shortly after. With some other logging equipment companies, you’d be waiting a couple of weeks. They have everything right down to new and rebuilt engines – they even have grapples right there.”
He especially appreciated the work done onsite at the Sennebogen warehouse to prepare packaged kits of frequently used service parts, including electrical components or O-ring packages. “You just buy one of these kits and you can save so much downtime looking for all this stuff. They really understand that downtime is a big expense to everyone. They do everything to have it ready and on time.”
Reducing downtime is also behind Sennebogen’s investment in a dedicated training facility. Four of the technicians from the Port Hawkesbury mill have attended the week-long training sessions there. Boulet was pleased with their reports, too. “They had one machine in the shop set up with classrooms upstairs. It’s a good program, from the classroom to the machine. They even broke the class into groups so one would go down and mess up the machine, and the other would have to go in and figure it out.”
Based in Stanley, N.C., Sennebogen offers a complete range of purpose-built machines to suit virtually any material handling application, including specialized equipment solutions for recycling and scrap metal yards, demolition, log-handling, transfer stations and waste facilities.