Forestry: Second-hand Kockums turned out to be too good to be true

IT’S easy to look back at the choices we made and believe it all turned out very well. All those great saws we felled with, the skidders we drove, the first harvester we saw. The sun always shone, it was never too hot, never too windy and all the people we worked with were a fantastic bunch. Well actually no, they weren’t. Some of them were absolute nightmares to get along with; liars, cheats and hardly any of them could count.

Workers or workmates came and went, but the machines we bought stuck around, especially the lemons – and boy were there some of those.

I was persuaded to sell my first forwarder, a Lokomo 909, to the same guy who bought my first harvester. He wanted it and he was willing to pay whatever I wanted, so he got it. Of course he did.

The buzz locally was that the forest district didn’t want six-wheel-drive forwarders anymore. It was their contention that a six-wheeled forwarder did more ground damage than an eight wheeler, so everyone was buying Osa 250s and 838 Valmets. I was poor, so I had to look a bit further down the bargain aisle and what I found was a repossessed Kockums 8335, owned by a finance company and stored in Jas P Wilson’s yard at Dalbeattie. It’s about a seven-hour round trip to Dalbeattie from home, but I threw most of the junk out the back of my van and got an early start to take a look at what was on offer.

I’ve had better experiences with second-hand machinery. (Image: Simon Bowes)

I’d contacted the finance company and learned it would take £3,700 to settle the debt and take ownership of this wonderful machine. But the deal had to be done by year’s end, which was the last day of March. I think I went to view the machine on the 27th. This was before internet banking, so to pay someone instantly you had to physically go into the branch and have one of the staff make the transfer.

I arrived at Wilson’s and the old Kockums was a sorry sight. I should have turned around and headed back south, but it was a long way to go to admit defeat so easily. There were no batteries on it. One of Wilson’s mechanics rounded up a couple of suitable ones that had at least a bit of charge in them and then the first red flag showed itself. There were no terminals on the battery cables – they’d been cut off with bolt croppers. It clearly hadn’t been an easy repossession. The door lock was broken and it had no keys (more red flags waving merrily). The biggest shock of all was the 15 kilo gas bottle in the corner of the cab to which was attached a small single-element workshop heater. Not my first choice to have what was essentially an open flame in a forwarder cab. What could possibly go wrong?

With jump leads and mole grips and half an hour sorting the wiring so it didn’t pose so much of a fire risk, we attempted to start it and to my surprise the four-cylinder Volvo engine chimed into life and ran beautifully. It didn’t smoke, it didn’t rattle and the turbo didn’t grumble or whistle.

The Kockums operating at the peak of its powers. (Image: Simon Bowes)

Looking around the machine it was clear it had been run on an absolute shoestring, a particularly threadbare one at that. I should have walked away.

The parting shot from one of the Wilson’s guys who’d helped me was that they had plenty of parts in stock, which I later discovered was true, unfortunately.

It was an agonising decision, but I had the money from the sales of two machines sitting in the bank and my belief in my ability to turn the Kockums around made no reference to reality or practicality, so I paid the money on the last day possible and waited for my new machine to be delivered. Wilson’s regularly ran wagons into Yorkshire at the time, so I made a deal for them to drop it off when they had a wagon heading south. It duly turned up and smashed a rear bogie chain bearing almost as soon as I drove it off the wagon. I discovered the bogie was mostly full of water and the drive chain tensioner and its bearings were high and dry and totally unlubricated. This proved to be how it would be with this particular machine. I grew to hate it with a passion.

The Kockums 8335 was a later derivation of the Aktiv 747. It came equipped with various engines, Ford or Volvo usually, and a Clark transmission, commonly the three-speed version. Hydraulic pressure was created by a gear-type pump and distributed by Monsun Tison valve block units with either an EHC 35 or IPS 302 control for the functions. The EHC 35 used a single dial that turned up the speed on all the functions, while the IPS 302 allowed each function to be tuned individually. The engine, transmission and hydraulics were actually quite good and didn’t give much trouble other than this being the first of several machines I have owned that snapped a slew rack or pinion in the crane base, and the crane fell off once, but these were just minor problems.

It was the bogies that gave me most trouble, with the brakes a close second. They were always entertaining. Four discs, two on the front differential under the cab, two in the rear body. All four were equipped with Volvo 240 brake calipers. The number 240 doesn’t signify a particular code. It refers to the model of Volvo car they were more commonly used on. All four got very hot if you used them hard, or if they were sticking. They were thoughtfully positioned right in among all the oil and crap you find on a forest machine. I remember thinking they were probably more of a fire risk than the incendiary bomb fitted in lieu of a cab heater.

Amusingly, the rear differential had brackets to fit two calipers on each side – twice the calipers, twice the fire risk. Well done to the engineers for an inspired design.

The bogies were chain driven. I believe they were single-row 120 chains in the bogie, with a 100 drop chain from the drive sprockets on the differentials, the theory being that in times of trouble the lighter 100 chain would snap first and a repair would take minutes, not hours. The power from the engine went through the Clark gearbox via a torque converter into a transfer box which powered the front and rear differentials through two propshafts, one fore and one aft. The differentials had sprockets on their output shafts, which connected to drive sprockets inboard of the bogies. From the differentials onwards, the drive was all via what were essentially very large bicycle chains.

The problem with the bogies was that the chains were supposed to run in oil, but the inspection covers on the top of the bogies were a weak point unless they were properly maintained – and by that I mean sealed from the elements. There were two covers and they were secured by a number of countersunk-head allen screws located into countersunk holes in the plate. These screws were missing from the covers on all four bogies. They had been replaced with standard M10 bolts and this omission had allowed water into the bogies.

It cost an arm and a leg to buy enough of the correct bolts to fix the problem and drain and fill all four bogies with new 90-weight gear oil. Wilson’s provided me with two complete bogie chain tensioners and various pins, spacers and bushes. I went through all four bogies although, as is common, the front ones were almost serviceable apart from the water ingress. I refitted all the covers properly and sealed them with copious amounts of high-grade bathroom silicon.

I bought two new Volvo brake calipers, resealed the others and got the brakes working. I threw away the gas bottle and repaired the original cab heater with a second-hand fan unit out of a scrap wagon. Half a day with some fuses, crimp connectors and new wire had almost all of the gauges and lights working. A new main isolator, ignition switch and battery leads sorted the starting, and stopping was fixed with a stop cable from a Ford 5000 tractor.

I can clearly remember loading the first lot of 3.1-metre chipwood. I can remember it because I tipped the bunk over throwing the last grab of timber off. It still remains the easiest machine to cowp I have ever driven. I should have sold it then while I could have made a few quid.

Less than a month into owning the pig I was leading some western red cedar logs out of a job for a local man who specialised in cutting foliage for wreaths. I was on my last load and the machine began to hold back as if I was hung up on a stump.

Then there was an almighty bang and a wheel went bouncing across the wood.

One of the rear wheel bearings had collapsed and the resulting lock-up had snapped the shaft and freed the wheel.

That required the whole bogie to be removed and taken home, where I replaced the bearings, the broken shaft and welded up the ripped metal in the bogie box itself where the bearings had tried to make a getaway. I’m sure by now Wilson’s had a box of Kockums bogie parts sitting somewhere in their spares department with my name on it.

There was an uneasy truce between myself and the Kockums for several months after that. I didn’t work it too hard and it didn’t break down ... much. I did a heathland-restoration job for English Nature over the winter and apart from putting the crane back on when it fell off and putting a new slew rack in it we seemed to muddle along quite nicely.

I had several months on that job and the pay was good. I found myself with quite an amount of disposable funds, so when I found out a contractor I knew had gone bust and his equipment was being sold by auction I arranged myself a bidder account and went to the sale. He had a long history with Kockums forwarders, having run a fleet of them, and he was good at keeping them up to scratch, as they say. He also had a really nice 250 Osa Eva harvester which I thought might not make much money. I was wrong. He had a Rottne forwarder too, which also made a lot of money. I bought the only Kockums 8335 he had left, for £3,700. Maybe it was fate, I don’t know.

This new 8335 had two problems. One I discovered when I was driving it onto the low loader, another when I drove it off. First of all, it had an air-operated gear-selector system; same as the other, only this one would select drive but didn’t select neutral very well. Not something you need to discover when you’re trying to stop it at the far end of a low-loader deck. The second was that it had a fuel starvation problem. Run it over half throttle under load and the engine would die.

The first problem was caused by a bad head gasket in the water-cooled air compressor. This was allowing water and oil into the air lines, forming a particularly unpleasant goo that made the gear selector valves stick, particularly the neutral selector. I blew the lines out and changed the compressor for an air-cooled one. An easy fix. 

It may have looked like a deal on paper, but it cost an arm and a leg to get the 8335 in (barely) working order. (Image: Simon Bowes)

The fuel took a while longer. Someone had used a stack of fittings in the diesel lines at the lift pump and there was a periodic blockage. I never found out why, but one of the many fittings used had a hole in it that was no more than 3 mm in diameter. Even the smallest, most insignificant piece of dirt would block it. I spent a couple of quid to put the correct fuel line fitting in and that was job done. That Kockums was fitted with a non-turbo, four-cylinder Ford engine, and while it didn’t have the power of the turbo-charged Volvo in the other one, it was a better machine in almost every other way.

I now had two forwarders. One was used to extract timber, while the other was relegated to burning brash, an integral part of the heathland-restoration job.

With the job almost finished I decided the troublesome Kockums had to go, so I advertised it and two brothers from Wales came to see it. I loaded it with timber, drove it out and unloaded it, drove it back into the wood, loaded it again and then one of the brothers drove it out and unloaded it. We stood talking for a while and they had made their minds up that they would buy it. However, one other brother decided that although he wouldn’t be using it he did want to try it, so jumped in and started it up. I saw him looking at the dash and he shouted that the oil pressure light hadn’t gone out. He blipped the throttle, but it stayed on, so he stopped the engine. I lifted the bonnet and the turbo was almost glowing red. I immediately knew what had happened. The Volvo TD engines of that era had an oil pump that was driven by a shaft and the gear on that shaft was prone to shearing off, which was exactly what that one had done. Needless to say, they changed their minds and I had to face the prospect of yanking the engine out to change the oil pump. I was so angry I could have set it on fire, but it wasn’t insured. I still considered it. It would have been expensive, but watching it burn might have been worth it. I’ve never detested anything as much as I detested 
that Kockums at that moment.

Can’t say I was sad to see the back of this one. (Image: Simon Bowes)

Luckily the contractor I’d hired to do the last of the felling with his harvester decided he needed a cheap forwarder. When he suggested he would buy it as it was I agreed, but I did question his sanity. I bought an oil pump from Wilson’s and we fitted it over one long weekend. I knocked the price of the forwarder off his next few harvesting invoices and everyone was happy, especially those two Welsh boys who did what I should have done almost two years earlier – walked away unscathed, save for the cost of driving to Yorkshire and back.