Chilly,

Nice work, looks like a professional job. That's big enough to haul bigger then fenceposts though. Just need to be real careful on the hills if you have anything of any size on there.

 

I've got a boat winch that will attach to the plate on the upper part of the arch, but for smaller stuff I'm going to rely on muscle to raise it high enough to hook the choker chains into the slots in the plate.

I haven't used one, but the people that I know who have give them good reviews.

That is the primary reason, it takes a lot of the load off the ATV, since it's much easier to drag only a small part of the total length of the log. Also, at this time of year we have a great deal of mud and water to deal with, and it should keep the wood much cleaner (read less sharpening of saw chains, etc) There is also the safety factor, I've had a 9 foot post dig in under a root as it was being dragged and flip end over end, just missing me.

 

The inside width at the bottom of the arch is approx. 26 inches, so we can tuck a decent sized piece or pieces of log in there. Most of the posts we cut are 6-8" juniper, I usually try to get three 8 foot posts out of every tree, two minimum. Makes for a decent load on the ATV without stressing it to the point of breaking something. If I can haul out three 8 foot posts per trip, or a couple of trees to cut to length later, I'm satisfied with that. The only other consideration I was giving to the design was a pivoting coupler to prevent the load from being able to flip the ATV in the event of a rollover on rough ground. In the end, I decided that the load was hung low enough that it wasn't going to be a serious issue on the ground I typically drive over when cutting. We try to use a rope and ****** block to snake the trees out to a hauling road before dragging them out, I'll only cut a road into an area if it's loaded with prospective candidates for posts.

We used 1 1/2 x 1/8 square steel tube for the frame, with 2 x 1/8 for the coupler tongue. The rims are from a lawn tractor, redrilled to fit on Plymouth Acclaim hubs from a junkyard. Tires were a dumpster find at a dealership, Maxxis 25-10-12 with most of the tread gone. The lack of tread suits me just fine, the Mud Lites on the Honda dig up enough mud without the trailer contributing.

 

Works like a charm, much easier hauling and things stay cleaner, including me when I'm handling the posts afterwards. Added a pic showing the arch in use.

 

This is good info guys, thanks. When I retire from the Corps and the kid has graduated high school, the plan is to move back to NW Mn where I intend to heat both the house and the shop with wood.

 

There really is no heat like wood heat. Nice thing about using the arch is it gives the quad some exercise, and me too. It's not exactly a production platform, but it does the job, eases the impact on the ground (not always our property) and gave me a good project to work on too. Does it sound like I'm looking forward to retirement?

Chilly

 

chilly,

nice design on your arch. I noticed the wood you were hauling was about 6-8" diameter as you mentioned. No offence but around here we haul much bigger loads of wood that size and larger with "sleds" or carts both 2 and 4 wheel. Seems like you know your way arround a welding machine and making one would be rather simple. The 4 wheel carts are better because they don't put as much weight on the quad but obviously need more room to turn around. I perfer the sleds myself but I just got a 2 wheel cart with 14" car tires on it this year and have yet to try it out. I'll post pics of the cart in a day or so but heres a pic of the sleds. wood sleds you can get an idea of what the sleds look like I pile the wood on up over the height of posts, when I don't have broken down atv's on there LOL. sleds from behind heres another of a plie of logs before loading them on the sleds log pile here are 2 pics of the sleds loaded with logs load 1 and load 2

 

I considered building the sled version, but the ground here is pretty rough, and we literally cut our way into the area we're hauling from, ergo the wheels. I like the extra flotation the ATV tires give over really soft ground in the spring months.