The construction boom in South Africa is keeping Spitzkop Sawmills busy and the company's logging trucks on the road.
The construction companies in South Africa don't have to hunt for customers: The construction of new shopping centres and housing developments is keeping the builders working at full capacity, while the building materials sector is reaping the benefits of the flourishing construction segment.
In Sabie, in the north-eastern part of the country, sawmills are producing lumber as fast as the raw wood can be harvested and transported. Even though there is a high concentration of the wood refining industry in the area, there is enough work for everyone at the moment, and the construction industry demand is keeping the product prices at a good level.
One of the sawmills in the area is the Spitzkop Sawmills. The raw materials of the family-owned business are typically sourced from within a 100-kilometre range of the forest-dense Sabie area. However, the commercial forests of South Africa are more like tree farms where Eucalyptus and pine is grown in meticulous rows and quickly reaches harvest maturity - about 10 years for Eucalyptus and 30 for pine.
In 2004, a total of 33 million cubic meters of wood was felled in South Africa, where trees are harvested almost entirely by hand. Trunks are felled and cut into shorter logs with chainsaws and then transported to the roadside with four-wheel-drive farm tractors equipped with trailers. The crane is mounted on the drawbar of the trailer.
On steeper slopes skidders are used to pull bigger trees, and on the steepest slopes cable winches are needed, just like in the Alpine countries.
Spitzkop Sawmills has about 350 people working in timber transportation and at the sawmill, where it produces all sizes of boards and planks for the construction industry. The sawmill's annual output is about 70,000 cubic meters.
The six company-owned trucks transport the pine logs used as raw material. Rather than each truck having its own timber crane, there is one crane to load several trucks. Spitzkop Sawmills has replaced its older log loading cranes with LOGLIFT's 82 S forestry crane.
Loglift's dealer and partner, 600SA, had its Nelspruit regional site deliver and install the new timber crane. Spitzkop Sawmills has been doing business with 600SA for over 20 years. The owner and the managing director of the sawmill, Servaas Nieuwoudt, says, that they have been satisfied with their LOGLIFT crane and with its price/quality ratio as well as with the service they've received.
The LOGLIFT 82 S and 96 S models are among the most common crane models used on logging trucks in South Africa.
"When a lot of timber is loaded from a single felling site where the driving distances are long and not all the trucks are equipped with a crane, the best log loader is an independent loader, like the robust F 111 F 71. In South Africa, dozens of them have been installed on the chassis of 2-axle trucks with a pair of flap down legs", says Jukka Vanhanen, Loglift Jonsered Oy Ab's Marketing Manager, Southern Europe and Africa.