f the extra wood grown can often outweigh the value realised in the through post production.
These points are true at least as far as we at Herbert were concerned because we were really on a smaller scale.
We liked to provide employment and generate revenue, so we generally were not too concerned if the thinning was a trifle late. In fact the pruning was late anyway. This was because a
t about age 12 the gorse was suppressed and easy to push through - so we developed the technique of doing a one hit lift 0 - 6m at age 12. This was against the idea of 'good forestry husbandry' but pushing guys into green gorse and a visit to a tree three times [o-2m, 2-4m & 4-6m] did not seem the right thing to do in our circumstances.
Still not always were the post of good quality - straight and fat.
The new wooden posts were in demand because the gorse hedges were being removed and post & wire fences replaced them.
There were areas of Pinus nigra var laricio [generally called nigra these days] that were not fully stocked so at about age 15 we began clearfelling those for posts - they had a marked taper but were of good quality.
There were two main players in the market:
a) Concrete Products - later to become Waiareka Industries, then Great Southern. These people were making concrete fence posts and had turned to these wooden ones. They had their own treatment plant and Charlie Crisp was the owner and his assistants were the Stanaway boys - Doug was to become the manager of Waiareka Industries. These guys used a Skilling post peeler.
b) McCullum & Co - later to become Fletchers with various name changes to become Placemakers. This was a building supplier and hardware company and they later bought and sold the Herbert sawmill. Bernie McMullan was the manager and his sidekick was Stuart Renalson. Their peeler was a Cundy.
The first post cutter on the forest was Frank Ford who contracted to McCullum & Co. - he was Adrian's older brother. Frank had done things the hard way and he had a wheel tractor with a modified trailer to haul the posts out to the fire break. Manual work - those green posts are heavy. He would peel the post on the firebreak and stack them to dry.
I recall he employed Mike for a while, and one day Frank said to me, 'Mike's bloody rough! he seems to be always breaking something!'
Mike told me, 'Frank's patient, I'm trying to get him to sack me - but he won't!'.
The situation was that if Mike was sacked, he would be entitled to an unemployment benefit, but if he quit, he would have to stand down for 6 weeks!
I facilitated a happy end.
Talking about ends - the payment for the posts was by the cubic metre ( well foot in those days). So we had to measure the small end diameter of each post and apply volume tables. Later we took a sample of 100 post and measured them to gain an average, them just counted the posts.
Frank used to stack the posts to dry and sometimes it was difficult to find which end was the small one, then difficult to tell if you had tallied them all!
McCullum & Co had a truck to transport the dry posts to the treatment yard, and Skippy was the driver (Skippy was an Auzzie). He used to load the truck by hand! I suggested to Bernie that they purchase a Hiab, a sort of crane built on the truck. They bought on and I found Skippy loading the grapple manually. I suggested that he work it how I had seen in my travels - I had never operated one! He became an excellent operator and could almost make the machine talk! One day a log slipped out of the grapple and smashed his leg - after that he preferred not to operate the machine.
We had some adventures along the way - one time he left his Hiab up! The bridge over the Waianakarua river had a frame on top, and the Hiab smashed into it! Never hurt the bridge at all! Another time he had too many posts on and became jammed under the bridge frame - so we let his tyres down and that got him across but we had to pump them up again at HQ.
He lifted the concrete slab I had made for my water tank stand - one of the eyes I built into it for lifting slipped out! But good old Skippy managed to wangle things for a good outcome.
When Frank Ford moved on, the team of Ross Ewing (Russell's son) and Henry Wedderall took over. These were a team of hard workers and hard players as well. Prone to taking the odd crop tree as well. But these guys had targets and worked hard to achieve them.
Perhaps t
hey did the odd dopey thing - one time they were following me up Queen's Road. I was driving the old Commer with a load of men, so progress was slow and I had no where to pull over. So they attempted to pass! With no room to do so, there truck toppled over the road batter. We checked to see if they were ok - they were drunk but otherwise fine. We left them to it. [You would wonder why they were drunk at 8 o'clock in the morning, but anyway.
They used a Cat D2 crawler tractor and a trailer to extract the posts. And later changed to various types of tractors. Their tenure was long and they earned enough money to buy starter farms and contributed to the wider community.
Along came Brian Arbuckle. He was working for Waiareka Industries and had bought a near new 4X4 Ferguson tractor that he modified for the job. Brian was a bit of a larrikin really and he employed a few as well! They
could produce a few posts as well but Mondays were a loss because they were 'too crook [with the piss]' to work. But they usually made up for it. The Skillings peeler worked off the PTO and so was quite powerful, 
but reduced the size of the post considerably. Much later he bought a Skidder and because such machines have a winch, it was possible to extract posts from much steeper areas.
Arbuckle ended up working on his own or with his son and they used to take advantage of the forest access to hunt for deer and pigs - illegally really. Brian lost a leg in a logging accident [off the forest] but continued to operate his Skidder.
Bob Clark, Max Speed and Chopper Johnston took on the Fletchers contract and they were a stable hardworking crew - reliable. They too bought a Skidder (first a Timberjack from Bert Bennett) One time we were looking for an access track through a steep area of bush and the Skidder could not back out! Bob was driving and he was an expert. We tried hooking trees on to the winch, but they were simply pulled over. We had to dig a trench and put in a solid log as a dead man. This pulled the machine out.
Of course the demand for fence posts petered out and the people moved on - Fletchers/Placemakers went out of timber treatment. Posts became a byproduct of the larger logging operations.
These were colourful times and the people involved were colourful but those times have largely been forgotten.
We liked to provide employment and generate revenue, so we generally were not too concerned if the thinning was a trifle late. In fact the pruning was late anyway. This was because a
t about age 12 the gorse was suppressed and easy to push through - so we developed the technique of doing a one hit lift 0 - 6m at age 12. This was against the idea of 'good forestry husbandry' but pushing guys into green gorse and a visit to a tree three times [o-2m, 2-4m & 4-6m] did not seem the right thing to do in our circumstances.Still not always were the post of good quality - straight and fat.
The new wooden posts were in demand because the gorse hedges were being removed and post & wire fences replaced them.
There were areas of Pinus nigra var laricio [generally called nigra these days] that were not fully stocked so at about age 15 we began clearfelling those for posts - they had a marked taper but were of good quality.
There were two main players in the market:
a) Concrete Products - later to become Waiareka Industries, then Great Southern. These people were making concrete fence posts and had turned to these wooden ones. They had their own treatment plant and Charlie Crisp was the owner and his assistants were the Stanaway boys - Doug was to become the manager of Waiareka Industries. These guys used a Skilling post peeler.
b) McCullum & Co - later to become Fletchers with various name changes to become Placemakers. This was a building supplier and hardware company and they later bought and sold the Herbert sawmill. Bernie McMullan was the manager and his sidekick was Stuart Renalson. Their peeler was a Cundy.
The first post cutter on the forest was Frank Ford who contracted to McCullum & Co. - he was Adrian's older brother. Frank had done things the hard way and he had a wheel tractor with a modified trailer to haul the posts out to the fire break. Manual work - those green posts are heavy. He would peel the post on the firebreak and stack them to dry.
I recall he employed Mike for a while, and one day Frank said to me, 'Mike's bloody rough! he seems to be always breaking something!'
Mike told me, 'Frank's patient, I'm trying to get him to sack me - but he won't!'.
The situation was that if Mike was sacked, he would be entitled to an unemployment benefit, but if he quit, he would have to stand down for 6 weeks!
I facilitated a happy end.
Talking about ends - the payment for the posts was by the cubic metre ( well foot in those days). So we had to measure the small end diameter of each post and apply volume tables. Later we took a sample of 100 post and measured them to gain an average, them just counted the posts.
Frank used to stack the posts to dry and sometimes it was difficult to find which end was the small one, then difficult to tell if you had tallied them all!
McCullum & Co had a truck to transport the dry posts to the treatment yard, and Skippy was the driver (Skippy was an Auzzie). He used to load the truck by hand! I suggested to Bernie that they purchase a Hiab, a sort of crane built on the truck. They bought on and I found Skippy loading the grapple manually. I suggested that he work it how I had seen in my travels - I had never operated one! He became an excellent operator and could almost make the machine talk! One day a log slipped out of the grapple and smashed his leg - after that he preferred not to operate the machine.
We had some adventures along the way - one time he left his Hiab up! The bridge over the Waianakarua river had a frame on top, and the Hiab smashed into it! Never hurt the bridge at all! Another time he had too many posts on and became jammed under the bridge frame - so we let his tyres down and that got him across but we had to pump them up again at HQ.
He lifted the concrete slab I had made for my water tank stand - one of the eyes I built into it for lifting slipped out! But good old Skippy managed to wangle things for a good outcome.
When Frank Ford moved on, the team of Ross Ewing (Russell's son) and Henry Wedderall took over. These were a team of hard workers and hard players as well. Prone to taking the odd crop tree as well. But these guys had targets and worked hard to achieve them.
Perhaps t
hey did the odd dopey thing - one time they were following me up Queen's Road. I was driving the old Commer with a load of men, so progress was slow and I had no where to pull over. So they attempted to pass! With no room to do so, there truck toppled over the road batter. We checked to see if they were ok - they were drunk but otherwise fine. We left them to it. [You would wonder why they were drunk at 8 o'clock in the morning, but anyway.They used a Cat D2 crawler tractor and a trailer to extract the posts. And later changed to various types of tractors. Their tenure was long and they earned enough money to buy starter farms and contributed to the wider community.
Along came Brian Arbuckle. He was working for Waiareka Industries and had bought a near new 4X4 Ferguson tractor that he modified for the job. Brian was a bit of a larrikin really and he employed a few as well! They
could produce a few posts as well but Mondays were a loss because they were 'too crook [with the piss]' to work. But they usually made up for it. The Skillings peeler worked off the PTO and so was quite powerful, 
but reduced the size of the post considerably. Much later he bought a Skidder and because such machines have a winch, it was possible to extract posts from much steeper areas.Arbuckle ended up working on his own or with his son and they used to take advantage of the forest access to hunt for deer and pigs - illegally really. Brian lost a leg in a logging accident [off the forest] but continued to operate his Skidder.
Bob Clark, Max Speed and Chopper Johnston took on the Fletchers contract and they were a stable hardworking crew - reliable. They too bought a Skidder (first a Timberjack from Bert Bennett) One time we were looking for an access track through a steep area of bush and the Skidder could not back out! Bob was driving and he was an expert. We tried hooking trees on to the winch, but they were simply pulled over. We had to dig a trench and put in a solid log as a dead man. This pulled the machine out.
Of course the demand for fence posts petered out and the people moved on - Fletchers/Placemakers went out of timber treatment. Posts became a byproduct of the larger logging operations.
These were colourful times and the people involved were colourful but those times have largely been forgotten.
