Anyone use a manual truck crane and grapple to load wood into a pickup? I'm looking at the hitch-mounted cranes and wondering which, if any, is worth a try.
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Truck Cranes
- Thread starter Holmes Anderson
- Start date
I have no experience with truck cranes, but I'm guessing a rig like Glenn Lucas has would be more useful. I'm thinking I might try to build one. (if I can get the motivation and block out the time)
View: https://youtube.com/shorts/L-xNH7qKlAM?si=6OEXsDUaPbZaoCTW
Can’t answer about cranes, but I’ve used a ladder (ie 8ft ~Little Giant type). Lash the log to the mid-point of the ladder, leave one end on the ground a little away from the truck gate and lift the other end up until the log sits on the truck bed. This way the force you have to lift is equal to half the weight of the log.
I have a bed hoist purchased from Harbor Freight mounted in the rear of the bed so that it doesn't interfere with 4' load capacity between the wheel wells. The column is supported with homemade bracket attached to the edge of the bed and a right angle bracket underneath connected to the frame.
I use a hitch mounted hoist that was originally purchased for processing deer. I now use it without the gambrel for loading logs onto the truck. I put two straps on the hook instead of the gambrel. Works fine and eliminates the need to have a hoist permanently mounted to the bed of the truck.
I also use a hitch-mounted hoist (https://www.vikingsl.com/rack-jack-ii/). Rather than using the hand crank, I use an electric hoist that really makes things easy. Here it is in action.
If the auto makers keep making pickups taller and taller, everyone will need a crane to load everything!
I've started to keep a small step stool behind my seat, because the bed of my truck is 41" above the ground. 😕
My diesel Dodge seems small next to some of those monsters.
Seems to us that some of those with massively jacked up trucks got them to drive to go to Walmart and McDonalds.
Those guys prob wouldn't dare get the bed dirty with nasty ol' wood.
This is the portable "crane" I use these days to handle trees and load big wood on trucks and trailers for other turners.
Get one for your back yard and haul it to the logs on a trailer. The kids can play with it on weekends.
Tree down, no problem. Lift, cut, load, haul.
And this one is handy, for 2000 lb logs as well as rocks.
I pushed over a 95' tall tree then carried it up the hill to a better spot for chainsawing.
It can fit in the garage.
JKJ
That is nice if it is where the wood is!
In september I was offered some some trees that were about 6 miles down a forest trail so after cutting them to 100" lengths they were about 600 pound each and I loaded them with the bed mounted hoist until I figured I had a load.
Yes, that’s the kicker.
So many times I’ve taken equipment on a trailer to where the trees were down, or being cut down, use the equipment to load logs on the trailer, leave the equipment there, haul the trailer home and unload the logs somehow, drive the empty trailer back to get the equipment! What a pain, especially if it was a long drive! I have more than one trailer but just one truck. Things got a lot easier when I could take a machine to the site and have another at home to unload.
I wouldn’t do it unless the trees looked worth it for the sawmill. There is far too much wood available if using it just for turning.
Another thing about having at least a tractor with a FEL (with chain hooks welded on the bucket) is tree services and utility companies working in the area would bring logs and dump them on my property where I could move them without having to haul the equipment. If they are working fairly near, it saves them a LOT of time and some money. They even asked me what kinds and sizes of logs I could use and just brought those. The problem was pretty soon I had more than I could saw and use and had to tell them to stop.
If the tree service (or utility) is using a bucket truck, most can use it as a crane and lift and load. The lifting capacity is sometimes limited but for woodturners, shorter pieces are great! It saves them a lot of work since they don’t have to haul off the wood. When a electrical utility was clearing for a power line recently, they also brought a truck with a powerful hydraulic grapple - If I wanted certain logs they would pull them out and stack them where I wanted.k Again, they were glad to do this since it saved them from hauling to dispose of the wood.
Another thing tree services will sometimes do if not using a bucket truck: I would take just a trailer and they would cut logs up into pieces two or three people could life and load by hand, or roll up the trailer ramps. That was easy.
Sometimes some fellow woodturner would come cut and load. (I’m sure most of us have done that.) Two of us recently got a truck load of persimmon from a downed tree, cutting pieces small enough that two old guys could carry them. Persimmon (American Ebony) is kind of bland but is wonderful to turn - hard, fine grained.
Also, for those who have a trailer or flat bed truck, you can easily load big logs by yourself (no help, no equipment) with nothing more than a couple of ramps and a chain, using a method called parbuckling. It’s pretty easy: position the trailer next to the log, set up two ramps (I use 10’ long pieces of steel I-beam), wrap the chain around the log enough times with the free end coming off the top of the log, get on the other side of the trailer and pull on the chain and the log will roll up the ramps. I’ve pulled with a 4-wheeler, someone’s car, or even disconnected the truck from the trailer and pulled with it. If the log is not too big one or two people can pull the chain by hand. Parbuckling is a method used well back in history to move big things.
I have a little book that shows many methods use many centuries ago to move and lift huge and heavy things. Some drawings showed very clever methods of rigging, sometimes with tall poles, often with many dozens of men or horses pulling long ropes move and position things. And we sometimes think we are clever.
I wish I had more advice specific to the topic of this thread. I’ve known several serious woodturners who permanently mounted cranes in their truck but that was a long time ago, can’t remember what they used. Seems like one method was to mount the crane to one side just behind the cab. There is probably a lot of good information on other forums, woodweb, etc.
JKJ
My truck bed may not be 41" off the ground but it feels like it is. I ended up buying a tire step and it works well. Just don't forget about it and leave it on the tire. 🙂
The deer hunter variety slide into the trailer receiver and swivel. I have seen them second hand on marketplace or craigslist. I have a log arch trailer to be able to load 12' long longs.
My brother-in-law, a career wildland firefighter, used to swear by Mule brand cranes. One of the guys in our club who would like to be a production bowl/platter maker got a flatbed pickup and put an extendable hoist on it of the same style, and it worked well for us. I have seen ones that fit into the pocket on the corner of the bed, but those would be lesser capacity. https://westernmule.com/index.html
This is awesome and what my 79 year old back is begging for. Can you supply a link for the winch and is it powered by the truck somehow or is an inverter needed?
This is the one I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B091BXYCZT
The truck is fully electric and has 120 and 240V outlets in the bed, which makes it easy to use. A 12V version will likely work just as well.
I have a lift gate on my truck. So I roll the log sections on to the lift gate.
Plus one for the hitch-mounted, deer processing rig. My FIL had one made several decades ago. I used it for lifting logs and initially couldn’t get it to spin too easily (things were a bit rusty inside the two pieces. So I got out my very large pipe wrench and that was all it took to get them in the bed of the truck!
