I haven’t seen many horror movies, but I have an idea for one: The protagonists are wandering through a forest—at night, obviously—when this monstrosity appears. It’s a four-wheeled logging rig called the HSM Project Outreach, and it has a ridiculously long arm that stretches 65 feet. In true thriller fashion, it even has a saw attached to the end. The entire flick is about them trying to outrun the machine. It is four hours long.
Obviously, that’s a joke, but this contraption is not. A German consortium actually developed it for safety, not danger, as the idea is to “replace accident-prone manual work and make fully mechanized timber harvesting possible.” It does so by swapping the feed rollers that typically delimb trees (like this) for a felling unit that cut through several dozen spruce and beech trees up to 17.7 inches in diameter during a test.
Everything about this HSM 405H4 8WD is heavy-duty, with the total weight clocking nearly 40 metric tons—more than 88,000 pounds. The boom on its own weighs more than 8,800 pounds, while the head is something like 1,875 pounds. While it’s OK that the vehicle itself is heavy, the consortium is working to slim down the felling head. At full extension while pulling a tree, it causes the wheeled portion to twist and contort. Fortunately, a report from the consortium says, “These [stability] limits can be extended by using bog tracks or inflating the tires with water.” Isn’t that nifty?
Once the operator has cut the tree, they pull it from the stump with a winch that’s mounted to the crane base and attached to the rotator. From there, they drag it close enough for a following machine to delimb and process the timber. With all the people involved nestled safely inside equipment, the risk of injury is far lower (but never zero when there are tall trees coming down).
From what I can tell, this machine is powered by a 7.7-liter Volvo diesel inline-six making 340 horsepower and 1,003 lb-ft of torque. It dispatches power to all eight wheels via a hydrostatic transmission with a two-speed transfer case, and of course, it has portal axles. You can probably go anywhere in it.
This particular iteration of the 405H4 8WD seems to be in development still, but it’s working well according to the consortium’s report. The only issue it faced during testing in the Altdorfer Wald forest district near Ravensburg was a bent saw blade, and the aforementioned moment of limited stability. Hopefully they’ll have it ready soon, so it can fulfill its role in my makeshift horror flick. I’m DM’ing Jordan Peel about it right now.
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