Page 192 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Left to right: Cat wheel loader at Weyerhauser millyard in Longview, WA in 2020; Mike Coiner, Peterson’s forest products expert
The traditional Cat wheel loader was another land- mark machine. “When I first got involved, if it was a Cat, it was a front-end wheel loader, or even a track loader, for years,” states Evans, who has been heavily involved in California’s Sierra-Cascade Logging Conference for nearly 50 years. “Back then, 90 percent of logs loaded onto trucks was done by wheel loaders. The 966 was real common but, for the most part, it could only load one log at a time.1 When the 988s and 992s came out for use in the mills, they could pick up the whole load at once. We demoed our first 988 with forks in the early 1980s in Redding. They were still construc- tion-based 988s but they’d been adapted with large forks and heavier counterweights for unloading a full truckload.”
Mike Coiner, Peterson’s forest products devel- opment manager, remembers the early front-end loaders. “We used to modify our own 988s when I was an apprentice at Papé in the early 1980s. At the time, Cat only had a bucket machine.” Coin- er ran his first 988 at the age of 13, up in south- eastern Alaska, pulling log rafts out of the Chilkat River, tearing them apart, then hauling the logs to
the mill his father managed. His experience in the field as a journeyman mechanic, and the woods as a logger in his own right, built a vast knowledge base that has aided Cat’s efforts in improving its forest products.
CAT’S WATERSHED MOMENT: THE CAT LOG LOADER
“Logging equipment has gotten much better through the years,” states Coiner. “It’s more effi- cient. And it’s grown in terms of durability and customer satisfaction. The Cat 568 Log Loader stands out on its own. I started working on the 568 Tier 4 interim years ago and have been involved the entire time. It’s the cream of the crop.” How- ever, back in the late 1970s and early 80s, Peterson, Papé and Halton were all making their own log loaders out of basic hydraulic excavators (HEX). Caterpillar’s first forestry-specific machines, the 228 LL and 231 LL, didn’t come out until 1986. “When I got to Halton in 1979, they were modify- ing 225s,” recalls Culligan. “We would take a con- struction-based excavator and modify it heavily
1 There was also a lot of sorting to get the proper logs onto the truck. Eventually, most of these front-end loaders were replaced by the more efficient log loader, which is built on a hydraulic excavator platform.
190 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG