Tony Meline lives in Coos Bay, a town of about 16,000 along Oregon’s southern coast. He wouldn’t live anywhere else but jokes that “We’re like the last place in the world to do anything modern.” If it’s true, than Meline is a pioneer of sorts. He was one of the first Oregon Bay Area loggers to buy a feller buncher.

Meline, 45, started hand falling timber for his dad when he was still in high school. In 1988 they formed TRM Cutting and then Meline took over the business when his dad retired.

The Bay Area is rugged and rocky — generally not conducive to mechanized cutting. About 10 years ago, however, timber that was growing on what Meline calls “good ground” came due for harvesting. “Good ground” is anything up to 40% slope where he can run a feller buncher. “We push it to 60% sometimes,” he says.

To meet the need for mechanized falling, people were bringing in feller bunchers from the Willamette Valley, a couple of hundred miles away. At the time Meline was contracting for Weyerhaeuser, so he asked the company if he could get their feller buncher work if he bought a machine. “The harvest manager said he would put me to work. He liked the idea of keeping the work with local people.” In 1999, Meline bought his first feller buncher, a Timbco, and one year later bought another.

He hired an operator for one machine and ran the other one himself until he and a partner started another business and the demands of running the new business, Riverside Logging, took him out of the driver’s seat. In 2003 he traded in both Timbcos for a Cat TK732. He downsized to one machine primarily because of employee troubles. “I got tired of fighting with operators, so I just went to one machine,” he says.

Last February he traded in the TK732 for the new Cat 532 track feller buncher with a Quadco 24-in. head. “The new 532 is a top-notch machine. It’s an animal,” he says. “The travel power and multi-functioning are really strong, and the hydraulics are smooth. I can travel, cut a tree at the same time and spin around and nothing slows down. It is night and day compared to the 732 buncher.” You can hear pride in his voice when Meline says this, because he actually deserves some of the credit for how the new Cat buncher turned out. He was practically a member of the design team.

It all started when Mike Coiner with Peterson Machinery, headquartered in Eugene, Ore., brought out the 732 for Meline to demo. “I thought it had some pretty good features. It had a few things I didn’t like but Peterson and Cat were working on them. Mike asked me if I was going to buy it and I said, well, if you take care of me I’ll take it. And that was the start of our relationship,” Meline recalls.

Meline worked closely with Cat engineers and Peterson. “The engineers rode with us and we showed them what the buncher needed to do. They went back and made the hydraulics work and changed all sorts of things.” 

As improvements were developed, Peterson made updates to Meline’s 732. “Whenever they took my machine for updates, they brought me a machine to run. They were taking care of me very well. I never lost any time. I trusted Mike. He said they’d back me and they did. They bent over backwards and I have everything good in the world to say about Peterson Machinery.”