Kenny's Loggin' – Breaking and Sorting Bundles

Nov 20, 2024 - 9 months ago

Scaling was an important part of the forest industry.

Kenny's Loggin' - Breaking & Sorting Bundles — *A view of the pockets, with the bundler and scale shack in the back. All the different sorts go into these pockets, and then are bundled by the bundler. Photo courtesy Barb & Lloyd Bowbotham.*

Scalers assigned dollar values, quality and volume to the logs. The pay rate was in group 12 of 15 in the I.W.A. Coast Master Agreement. Once you passed the government scaling exam a scaler was considered a “stock scaler” and you scaled wood that was going to M&B mills. If you wanted to scale wood that was going to be sold to other buyers you had to have a fbm. & cubic endorsement. To get this endorsement I had to be upgraded by Clayton Jarvis from Garret Log Scaling Company. He was one of the top scalers in the industry, and rumours were that Mister Jarvis would scale booms only wearing a “thong”!

Clayton and I worked on the grid to achieve this. The grid was a wooden deck that could be raised and lowered out of the water. You lowered it so you could push a bundle of logs onto it. The grid operator then tightened up the bundle and took the bundle wire off, then spreading the bundle out and raising the grid. These were “check scale” loads picked at random by a computer at the dump machine.

I got the job to scale an eight section boom of “fir peelers” which was one of the highest value of all the sorts that M&B used. It had about 170 logs in it. The boom then went to where ever “log supply” would store it, then prospective buyers would look at the booms. These buyers could ask for another scaler to scale the boom. Three scalers would end up scaling the boom. One scaler got a higher scale than I did and another got lower than me, so my scale stood as the official scale for that boom. I was quite proud of that and Bart Bjarneson who worked in Log Supply patted me on the back.

The bundles dumped from the logging trucks went to the “breakdown” float and the bundle wire was taken off of it, the load was then spread out and pushed into the “raceway.” Here the “graders attached different coloured tags to each log. When the logs came out of the end of the raceway the side winder boom boats would push them into pockets containing logs of one sort. Once in the pockets another boat would straighten them and tighten them up so the scalers could scale them. After that two more boom boats would take them to the “bundler.” Bundles were made to get more volume in the boom and also prevented individual logs from escaping when being towed to the mills. The bundles were about the size of the loads dumped from the logging trucks.

In the mornings the scalers would hop on one of the boom boats and get a ride to the scale shack. It was out by the bundling machine. The twelve by twenty shack on a log float had enough room for three scalers with an oil heater to keep warm and toast your sandwiches or heat a can of soup. We had a crab trap and would boil the crabs, clean them and take home a container of crab meat for the family. I would also catch a small cod, fillet it and cook it slowly in butter, yummy.

Us scalers were responsible for all the wood going threw the bundler, the boom sticks surrounding each boom. Also we had to scale “tow backs.” The mills stopped cutting boom sticks up for lumber and would get them towed back to the booming grounds for reuse.

This was a pretty cool job, as long as the bundler had wood, one could control the working hours, if the weather was snotty you could stay in the shack reading, in one month I read over one hundred “Louis La Moir” pocket books. To get paid a half hour of overtime we would scale at lunch time, which really bugged Terry Stanley the boom foreman, scalers liked doing this as not many boats were moving, then back in the shack for a snooze. Then after coffee time in the afternoon we would go scale some wood for the bundler for the next morning. This job as we knew it would not last forever!

Ken Wilson worked in the logging industry in B.C. for over 50 years. Ken is a regular contributor to Supply Post newspaper with his column “Kenny’s Loggin’”, and resides on Vancouver Island, B.C.