Experimental studies of forward operation with regard to its performance indicators, cutting area parameters and soil physic-mechanical properties

Wheeled forestry machines currently dominate the logging industry in Russia and in the world. According to representatives of the world's leading manufacturers of forest machines that supply logging equipment to the Russian Federation, the share of machines for tree-length harvesting in Russia is decreasing annually. On the territory of the Forest Fund of the Russian Federation soils of category III and IV predominate and in the warm period of the year they significantly lose their bearing capacity due to overwatering. Moreover, the processes of obvious climate warming in recent years have led to a significant reduction in the period of stable winter wood harvesting, and hence the period of effective skidding on such soils when they are in a frozen state has also decreased. This is noted by loggers of practically all subjects of the North-Western Federal district of the Russian Federation. As a result of working on waterlogged soils in the warm season, transport speeds, volumes of transported bundles of sorting materials, and, consequently, the productivity of forwarders decrease while fuel consumption and transmission wear increase, thus the unit cost of a cubic meter of harvested wood increases. In addition, intensive rutting leads to a negative ecological impact on the forest, resulting in slowing down of reforestation processes. Negative effect is also manifested in signs of water erosion on skidding lugs, root suppression, growth slowdown, weakening of trees left for rearing near traffic routes. The negative environmental factors of forwarders ' work must be taken into account, but the technical and economic indicators of their work, in the end, always come to the fore in the production process of logging. Experimental studies of forwarders ' productivity were carried out in production conditions on cutting areas located on the territory of Priluzsky and Syktyvkar municipal districts of the Komi Republic in the summer of 2019-2020. For experiments, John Deere 1210g, 1510G wheel forwarders were used. During the experiments, the soil was probed in the cutting area. The components of time spent on individual operations were recorded by timing.