TECHNICAL RELEASE: 12-R-11
Logging Systems: cold deck February 2012
INTRODUCTION: Metzler Forest Products is a full-service logging, trucking, landclearing, bark mulch production, wood shavings, and firewood firm. The company has 
Fig. 1: Cold decking of chips: chipper never has to wait for a truck.
been in business since 1986 and maintains a mulch, topsoil, wood shavings, firewood, retail nursery, and woodyard on a 20-acre site one mile south of Reedsville, Pennsylvania. The company’s two logging crews perform selective timber harvest, clearcutting, and right-of-way or other land-clearing jobs.
GENERAL FEATURES: Over the years, Metzler Forest Products has developed a logging and chip harvesting method that differs greatly from most Appalachian region chip harvesting contractors. Almost all Appalachian chip harvesting contractors blow their chips directly into chip vans that are shuttled in and out of the chipper’s chip stream. This is a practice known as “hot loading” of processed in-woods chips.
OPERATION: Instead of hot loading harvested hardwood chips, Metzler Forest Products “cold decks” the chips in piles of approximately 500 to 1,500 tons. They then use 
Fig. 2: Loading the chips from the cold deck pile: chips are available even when the chipper is not running.rubber-tired front-end loaders to load the chips from the in-the-woods-landing chip piles into open-top chip vans.
All loaders are equipped with “Loadrite Force” digital accumulating scales that weigh the tons of chips that are transferred into each chip van. The chip vans are loaded with 46,000 to 52,500 pounds of green chips, depending on the configuration and the weight of the chip van. It takes approximately 8 to 12 buckets and 7 to 10 minutes to load a single chip van. At the end of the loading cycle, there is a simple procedure involving rolling back the loader bucket, hitting “clear” on the Loadrite Force scale, raising the boom, and then hitting “zero” on the Loadrite Force scale digital readout module to reset the unit for the next load.
Metzler Forest Products has six Loadrite Force loader scale modules installed on various loaders. The reliability of the scale units is very good. The cost of a Loadrite Force scale installed is approximately $8,500 (see www.loadritescales.com for more information).
APPLICATION: This cold decking of chips method, coupled with the Loadrite Force scales, makes for a very productive and efficient chip harvesting operation. This system allows Metzler’s chip harvesting crews to operate continuously without waiting on trucks. Under the “hot loading” method our chip harvesting crew had to shut down the chipper unit for approximately 5 to 10 minutes every time a chip van was loaded and a new one was moved into place. This resulted in 40 to 100 minutes of chipper downtime during each shift. If Metzler Forest Products trucks or contract chip haulers happen to arrive late at the chip harvesting site, chipper shut-downs are even longer.
Fig. 3: Loadrite Force scale and control unit lets user load chip trailers with maximum legal payloads.
Fig. 4: Loadrite Force control u nit mounts conveniently inside the loader’s cab.The cold deck chip pile system allows Metzler’s haul truck flow to vary considerably without impairing the capacity of the chip harvesting crew. Sometimes when three or four chip vans arrive late in the day, instead of keeping the chip harvesting crew operating to hot-load these trucks, the chipper crew can be released on time, and a single loader operator can load the late-arriving chip vans. On some occasions, the truck drivers themselves have the necessary capability to load their own chip vans with the rubber-tired loader.
The final feature that makes this system cost-effective for Metzler is that the loader operator can load the chip vans to their maximum legal weights. The cumulative Loadrite Force loader scales are accurate on a chip van load to within 150 pounds. The operation can haul all the time at maximum legal weights.
FRA STAFF COMMENT:
The FRA staff rarely, if ever, see an Appalachian region logger revert to a cold chip pile loading system over the traditional hot chip loading systems. However, Metzler Forest Products has been utilizing this method of chip harvesting for some years and has found it to be a more efficient, productive, and profitable system than hot loading.
Reviewed by: Richard Lewis FRA President