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Mowbray’s uses their tracked 718 on a utility corridor in central Florida. Being able to access these right-of-ways with Sennebogen equipment eliminates the need for climbers and redundant equipment.

Tree care is notoriously dangerous. Wielding a chain saw while in a tree canopy 50 feet above a house carries with it a set of risks that reputable companies either manage to an acceptable level or avoid. But increased disease and pest infestation complicate the picture by compromising tree integrity, so once-stout species such as oak and ash can be less sound for climbers to work on. Combine this with urban arboriculture’s seeming endless capacity to absorb innovation, and you have a class of work that has grown to the point where it’s nearly unrecognizable from its inception a little more than a century ago.

New climbing techniques have skyrocketed, and single-rope ascent is becoming the norm. Mini skid steers help ground crews avoid the drudgery of hauling logs and brush by hand. But the key peaks on this horizon of innovation are the various large pieces of mechanized equipment that have abounded in recent years.

Perhaps the three most prominent types of mechanization are knuckle-boom cranes, telehandlers and tree handlers. All three incorporate various grapple saws that hold onto a piece of tree and cut with a chain saw operated from a remote position, so the tree workers doing these removals are a safe distance away or protected in an enclosed cab.

These three classes of mechanization each have their pros and cons, as well as their levels of popularity within the industry.

Knuckle-boom cranes

Knuckle-boom cranes, the most popular mechanization, have a long reach – as far as 120 feet or more – but cannot hold more than a few hundred pounds at this distance. Their dangle-head grapple and slow rotation times mean, while their utilization saves a climber from being in a dangerous, laborious position in a tree, the amount of time to remove the tree is not significantly reduced.

However, because urban arborists often work on residential backyard trees, the allure of a machine that can reach over a house is too hard to resist. Many companies, after procuring their chipper, chip truck and bucket truck, look toward the purchase of a knuckle-boom crane as their next step in growth.

Telehandlers

The second class of mechanized equipment is telehandlers, which have a straight stick attached to a mobile undercarriage. Similar to knuckle-boom cranes, telehandlers often have a long reach, but their fixed head means they have a far greater holding strength.

With the grapple affixed to a straight stick, however, the unit cannot articulate and make precise cuts. For the same reason, operators are hard pressed to help their crew members process the material once it’s on the ground.

These machines have more and more often been seen on tree-work social-media pages, and several telehandler manufacturers have encouraged their machines to be used in tree care applications. This unplanned success sometimes comes with an absence of a robust regional infrastructure for parts and service, though after-sale support is quickly catching up.

North-Eastern Tree Service is one of several companies using their machine in Rhode Island’s residential market. Picking a log with the 718 as if it were a crane keeps the job site clean and removes the need for excessive raking.

Tree handlers

The last class of mechanized equipment is synonymous with the name Sennebogen. Tree handlers are traditional material handlers fitted with a grapple saw, an extra hydraulic pump and a telescoping stick. In the case of the Sennebogen 718, the unit’s reach is 47 feet. Its older sibling, the Sennebogen 728, has a reach of 65 feet.

Like the telehandler, a tree handler has a fixed head and can comfortably control several thousand pounds. But its faster movements mean its load is quickly brought to the ground and processed. Similarly, its outriggers can be raised and lowered in seconds, not minutes, so the 718 is capable of multiple setups with little effort.

The major drawback to tree handlers, including the Sennebogen, is reach. What it gains in speed and strength is lost in reach, and an industry focused on reaching over houses has not been quick to adopt the Sennebogen into residential tree work. However, in the last two years, a growing number of tree care companies are seeing the Sennebogen’s applicability and have been experimenting with this unorthodox method of tree removal. And the other industry segments in which the 718 has found success have not diminished.

Burdick Tree uses their Sennebogen 718 every week on residential job sites in western Massachusetts. Their rule of thumb is “if you can get a bucket truck to the tree, then you can get the Senne to the tree.”

Trial by fire

Sennebogen first became an industry name in 2020, when dozens of units were used in fire cleanup efforts in California. But its North American origins reach back several years earlier, to when Dan Mayer, owner of Mayer Tree in Essex, Massachusetts, saw the ingenuity of the machine online, then brought one to the states shortly afterward. He shared with Sennebogen’s North American CEO, Constantino Lannes, his vision of a tree care industry in which hazardous or nuisance trees could be removed faster and more safely than previously thought possible, to the benefit of manufacturer, tree-company owner and customer alike.

Lannes quickly saw the vision and began implementing a plan that would roll out 718s across the country in various applications. While the California fires provided the most obvious utility for the 718 – with companies safely removing dozens if not hundreds of charred trees or trees that posed hazards to utility lines on a daily basis – the machine found productivity in a seemingly endless array of applications.

Fans of following heavy-equipment news online may have seen the Sennebogen 718 tear storm-damaged trees from houses in Omaha, Nebraska; remove entire roadside tree stands for lane additions in Columbus, Ohio; or carefully piece down limbs over a homeowner’s oak in Providence, Rhode Island. They may have seen it mow down roadside brush with a mulching attachment in Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii; snip saplings with a shear attachment along Interstate 81 in Virginia; clear power lines of overhanging limbs in Burlington, Vermont; or clear farmland in Campinas, Brazil.

And that’s not the half of it. These examples only touch on the number of attachments offered by Sennebogen for its tree handler: grapple saw, mulcher, mower, shear, rotary blade, stump grinder and brush clipper. Sennebogen’s endless drive to innovate ensures its customers always have a way of keeping their machines busy. And, being an established entity within the material-handler space, Sennebogen’s proven national support network ensures these machines will never be down, or down for long.

If the residential side of the industry has been slow to mount its support for working with tree handlers, Sennebogen’s customers have enjoyed being in a class of their own. Many 718 owners without similar competition can complete jobs so efficiently that they can win a bid at nearly any price and still have a sufficient profit margin.

In other areas of the country, using a 718 has become so ubiquitous that few serious companies in those regions operate without one. If mechanization in urban tree care is a niche, then using the 718 is a niche within a niche. But the cohort of Sennebogen owners in the field are proud and loyal, and are reaping the benefits daily.

Conclusion

Everything with mechanization is a tradeoff. Just acquiring a machine of any sort means higher efficiency, but also an additional obligation to complete more jobs to make the monthly payment. Thinking in terms of speed over reach is an outside-the-box-thinking endeavor. But thinking outside the box is a trait that unites all tree care workers, whether they’re swinging a chain saw 100 feet up in the air or sitting in the operator’s cab of a Sennebogen.

Cameron Kuklick is a tree care specialist with Sennebogen LLC, an eight-year TCIA corporate member company with headquarters in Stanley, North Carolina.

TCI Magazine’s Sponsored Content is a feature available only to TCIA corporate members. This article is sponsored by Sennebogen LLC.