Full of interesting stories, Lusto is Finland’s forestry museum. With it recently having undergone a major refurbishment, Forestry Journal was granted a sneak peek and tour of its machinery exhibits ahead of its long-awaited reopening.
AS the most forested nation in Europe, it’s only to be expected that Finland’s people enjoy a special relationship with its woods. It’s a relationship that is explored and celebrated at Lusto, the Finnish forest museum.
It was the launch of the new H Series from John Deere earlier this year which drew journalists from around the world to Finland and afforded them the rare opportunity to visit Lusto.
The museum is located 300 km east of Helsinki (and only a few kilometres from the Russian border) in Punkaharju, at the heart of the beautiful Saimaa lake district. Maintained by the Finnish Forest Museum Foundation, it first opened its doors some 30 years ago and today welcomes around 40,000 visitors annually.
That number is expected to rise to 50,000 following its recent refurbishment, consisting of the development of an extensive core exhibition project, renovation of the museum building and redesign of the museum concept.
Lusto was closed from September 2023, while the renovation was ongoing. Journalists, Forestry Journal among them, were welcomed for an exclusive tour and presentation shortly before its reopening in May.
Covering 2,000 square metres, the core exhibition, Land of Forestfulness, investigates the age-old relationship between the forest and mankind through six perspectives.
Reetta Karhunkorva, the museum’s head of research, explained a bit more about it.
“We are telling the whole story of humans and forests in Finland, from the past to the future – how we have lived with forests through history into the present time and how that relationship will continue,” she said.
“There are some questions we hope people think about when visiting our exhibition. What does the forest mean to you? How has it influenced the history of your family? What kind of forest future do you dream of? How do you understand the forest in general? What impact has it had on life in society and culture, communities and individuals? What impact have humans had on the forest? What will the forest be like in the future?”
These questions are raised across six separate themed areas within the exhibition.
The first, ‘Forest Nature’, focuses entirely on forests without the involvement of human beings.
“Here we want to talk about the forests themselves,” said Reetta. “We want to tell how complex ecosystems forests are, that they are much more than just trees. They are layered, complex ecosystems which have their own cycle that is much longer than ours. And the underground world in the forest is very important. There is much life and different networks.”
Next is ‘Green Gold’, exploring different raw materials.
“In Finland our wealth is based on forests,” said Reetta. “We have always relied on the forest resources, but it is a diverse raw material. It can be a berry forest, mushroom forest, timber, firewood, all of these things at the same time.
“In Finland, the forest was very important for the peasant household and enabled the country to industrialise in the 19th century. They enabled us to raise our standard of living. Finland was one of the poorest nations in the 19th century and it was thanks to the forest that our standard of living was raised. So they have been a very important resource for our country. Today the forest is also important as carbon sinks and for the replacement of fossil materials. So the resource aspect is evolving.”
‘Life Blood’ looks at the wellbeing of forests, what they offer people in terms of relaxation and recreation, while ‘Value Forest’ explores the strong feelings the forest inspires.
Identities relating to the forest are the focus of ‘Forest Folk’.
“We Finns often refer to ourselves as forest folk,” said Reetta. “We think of ourselves as coming from the forest. In the 19th century when Finland was departing from Sweden and became part of the Russian empire, we began to build our national identity. Identity was forged from the wilderness. Writers, artists and poets chose these specific landscapes as our symbol. Besides the national identity, there are many personal identities related to forests.”
The final section, ‘Forest Work’, offers a potted history of the mechanisation of timber harvesting in Finland, and was where the press group, admitted entry courtesy of John Deere, spent most of its time.
Here, machinery that once worked in the woods, from early chainsaws up to innovative harvesters, is on display, helping to tell the story of the industry’s mechanical evolution.
Curator and forest engineer Marko Rikala began by running through the early years.
He said: “A little over 100 years ago, in Lapland in North Finland, the biggest forestry company was harvesting near the Russian border and no rivers reached that far – or at least travelled in the wrong way, to the Arctic Ocean not to central Finland direction. So, they had to use some other means to transport the logs to the nearest suitable river, and the distance between was about 30–40 kilometres.
“The company solved this problem by buying two steam locomotives from the USA and building a sort of railway for the locomotives pulling a huge line of log sleds behind them. That was not a huge success, but it worked well enough.”
The real mechanisation of Finnish forestry work started after WWII, with attentions focusing first on logging and timber transport. There were chainsaws for harvesting, while agricultural tractors were initially used for moving timber out of the woods.
Since the early 1950s, agricultural tractors had often been equipped with half tracks for forestry purposes, to make driving on snowy and soft terrain easier. The front wheels were used for steering the tractor and tracks were placed over the rear wheels and bogie wheels. However, the half-track tractors were challenging to drive in forests as the front would easily lift off the ground when heavy loads were pulled.
At first, the Nordic countries used a lot of crawler tractors familiar from earth-moving works, such as Allis-Chalmers, Caterpillar and Clectra, but adaptation was slow. By 1957 there were still almost 300,000 horses and only 60,000 tractors in Finland. However, during the same year, the import regulation of tractors imposed during the war ended and the number of tractors began to increase.
Bamse, the first real forest tractor in the Nordic countries, developed by Bolinder-Munktell under Volvo in Sweden, was introduced in 1957. A major step in the story of forest tractors was the articulated steering, which was introduced at the end of the 1950s.
In the 1960s, two different types of forest tractors competed against each other – skidders, dragging their timber loads along the ground, and forwarders.
Eventually, the load-bearing forwarders became established as the preferred choice among operators, with the basic structure including a diesel engine with torque, articulated steering, six or eight wheels and a hydraulic crane.
Focusing on the earliest forwarders, Marko highlighted how the basic principle of the machines is the same today, though technology has improved a lot. Lusto’s collection includes a Valmet forwarder from 1966.
He said: “When they started to develop forest machines in Finland, they designed them not according to whole-tree method, like the USA or Canada or even Soviet Union, but timber sorting method that is even nowadays used in Finland and Scandinavia and elsewhere. That means they cut the trees to length in the forest.”
By the end of the 1960s, axes and horses had effectively been replaced by chainsaws, tractors and forwarders in the woods, but harvesters were yet to make their mark. One of the most important names in that story was Sakari Pinomaki, a forest technician, researcher and inventor.
Described as a quiet and creative thinker, he eventually held about 50 patents, designing and building his first harvesting machines with his own hands, inventing the components that weren’t available.
He developed the Pino-Teho machine for debarking trees and set up his own company in 1964. Its most important product in the early days was the Pika 50 processor, introduced in 1969. This was followed by the Pika 75 harvester in the next decade.
“As the name suggests, it was able to fell down the tree, cross-cut and delimb, and had a measuring device for the driver to measure the length at least. It was first produced in 1972, but our machine’s year model is ’82, so it’s 10 years newer than the first one.”
Perhaps the exhibit’s star attraction is the Plusjack walking harvester. Developed in 1999 by Plustech, Timberjack’s R&D unit (now part of the John Deere Group), the Plusjack harvester was ahead of its time in the early 1990s, and never went into production.
The prototype, however, clearly demonstrates the benefits of operating a machine without wheels. The eco-friendly harvester can operate on steep and uneven terrain, move in all directions and turn on the spot, and it does not leave any tracks on the ground.
For more details, the tour group was treated to a chat with one of the individuals responsible for the Plusjack’s development. Timo Neuvonen was heavily involved in assembling the machine and was partly responsible for testing operations.
Among other things, he designed an ankle structure for its articulated leg mechanism.
He told how development began in 1992, with the first walking machine displayed to the public in 1995 at Interforst. He joined the project in 1997.
He explained: “This was the first purpose-built walking harvester. The idea was that this would be suitable for steep slopes without the risk of errors and harm of continuous tracks.”
It was a project not without its challenges.
“In this project, we developed new control systems, looking at how to control pumps without hydraulic connection and so on. As for the computer processor used, our modern cell phones are much, much more powerful, but it had to handle all these movements. Sensors on the legs would constantly measure the forces on the machine. All its movements were automatic. It was controlled by joysticks, so the operator just gave the direction where he wanted to go and the computer would control the movement of the legs. It was actually really simple to use and could move in all directions, rotate on spot, go sideways, whatever the operator wanted.
“Plustech joined Timbertech and was then bought by John Deere, which did some analysis and decided not to take the machine into production. But a lot of the technology used in its development, a lot of those ideas, are used now in modern forest machines.”
No sooner had Timo finished telling the group about his time at Plustech than it was time to be off, hitting the next stop on John Deere’s tour of Finnish forestry.
But a return visit with more opportunity to explore the exhibits would be most welcome and is, for anyone with an interest in forestry who should find themselves in that part of the world, strongly advised.
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