I guess that's the end of it.

[245dlc]

Well I talked to one of my bosses yesterday it looks like our season has ended. They were waiting to hear about a job requiring an excavator and a couple of rock trucks but after a little rain and snow on Sunday night the customer got cold feet and hasn't been heard from. I was hoping I'd get another couple months out of the season, I'll have to make some calls around and see if anybody else has any work.

[Muz]

Sheesh .. thats an early finish .. or maybe not so depending on the weather .. time to seek out the other methods to get an income though .. well .. ther's always snow clearing .. sorry .. but I know what you Canadians are like .. maybe time to jump in the tub with some beers fella .. and think up a new strategy

[245dlc]

I think my best strategy to keep working is getting my own machine/s I'm not far from the city and the residential construction industry has been very strong the last few years and we never really felt the impact of the recession in the U.S. or Europe. But I don't think I'll be able to tackle that until at least next year at the earliest. The company I have been working for since September does mostly rural work like ditching, road building and repairs, drainage works and some agriculture related earth work like lagoons for hog operations (smelly work) as well flood related work in the spring. And no it hasn't snowed enough to require any snow removal work.

[Muz]

I think my best strategy to keep working is getting my own machine/s I'm not far from the city and the residential construction industry has been very strong the last few years and we never really felt the impact of the recession in the U.S. or Europe. But I don't think I'll be able to tackle that until at least next year at the earliest.

Well the big hassle is the continuity of work isnt it .. thats the trouble with finance (unless you have enough cash to buy outright) its always money out of your account every month come what may, rain or snow, so its not a decision to take lightly. Plus some customers wont stand for older kit, so something reasonably new has to be the order of the day.

Personally .. in the UK the plant game is really tough .. margins are so small and regulations are so tight, I wonder why anyone does it anymore ? :glare:

[245dlc]

Yeah we're not quite that bad, plus around here with our country being so huge and expansive if you've got something to hide you don't have to go far outside the city to do it. And with so much going on in Winnipeg these days the health and safety people from the government never venture outside of the city till something happens or so it seems. With tomorrow being a stat holiday (Rememberance Day) I'll phone around and see if anybody has any work that'll go through the winter or at least through the bulk of it. I was talking with my wife and we were thinking of printing out some flyers and putting them in people's mailboxes out in the countryside as there are lot of little acreages and farms around here and people seem to be pretty big into ponds and using the fill to raise they're land. If I could get a few jobs like that I'd likely go buy a machine. But for now I'll just rent or lease what I need.

[ianoz]

So How do you get though winter with out a paypacket coming in ?
We hadly ever stop working ,apart from rain . Most times we don't get a lot of that .

[245dlc]

A lot of guys go on unemployment insurance and when we get a bunch of snow like last winter they can be busy for several days plowing city streets and parking lots. I talked to an outfit nearby on Thursday that might be looking for operators at first they were going to try and con me into hauling pulpwood into Minnesota (U.S.A) but I don't have a passport or FAST card, and I have absolutely no interest in doing and like being home every night. So I'll talk to them more this coming week and see if they have any excavator work.

[ianoz]

How many kilometres round trip would that involve ?
A bit to the north of us there is Pine plantations at Yeppoon . Logs are trucked to Maryborough to the south 800 to 900 KM round trip at a guess .
To the west of us is another pine plantation . Logs from there some into gladstone and are processed into ice cream sticks .
Good luck with the job hunt . You certainly do have a different way of life up there .

[245dlc]

Yeah everything here revolves around the weather for the most part. In this part of Canada all of the paper mills have closed due to an assortment of politics. So whatever logging is going on is either for firewood which isn't much in the scheme of things, forklift pallet production (still pretty small market), and a little bit of paper production that's going on south of the border. I'm not sure how long a round trip is to wherever this paper mill is in Minnesota but I have absolutely no interest in doing it and both my wife and I like having dinner together every night and I'm sure if I did that kind of hauling I wouldn't spend much time at home at all. There is some construction that goes on during the winter, like house basements, land clearing since it's impossible to start a forest fire with two feet of snow on the ground.lol Sewer and water construction, some types of gravel production like road base, mining, lots of forestry since all the swamps and bogs are frozen, ice roads (that's kind self-explanatory), Utility construction, pipeline construction etc. Basically the things that can't be done are building roads and highways, paving, and anything involving compaction.

[ianoz]

I suppose you have rabid greenies up there too wanting to save the trees and kill the timber jobs ..Back in the 70s there where hundreds of small sawmills cutting fruit packing case timber . With the advent of cardboard boxs , packing case mills disappeared . There were also heaps of guys cutting rail road sleepers . But with concrete and steel sleepers , timber sleeper cutter are becoming a thing of the past .Friend of mine runs a hardwood sawmill , Last one in the whole area left cutting .

[245dlc]

Yeah this country's full of hippys I think the bulk of them live in British Columbia on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, but we still have our share here in Manitoba. Out here the Railroads still use wooden ties, some places use concrete but I think our freeze and thaw weather wreaks havoc on them, power poles are still wooden although I have seen some new concrete ones and steel ones. But I think the trees for these are cut in B.C. and Alberta I don't know if we have the kind they want here in Manitoba.