Timberjack is a manufacturer of forestry machinery for both cut-to-length and whole tree logging, and was a subsidiary of John Deere from 2000 to 2006.

History

Timberjack was founded in

Woodstock, Ontario Woodstock is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. The city has a population of 40,902 according to the 2016 Canadian census. Woodstock is the seat of Oxford County, at the head of the non-navigable Thames River, approximately 128 km from ...

in the 1950s by Wesley Maggill and Robert Simons, who designed an articulated four-wheel drive

tractor A tractor is an engineering vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort (or torque) at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery such as that used in agriculture, mining or construction. Most commo ...

with a winch at the back. They produced a prototype and production took off from there. There were affiliations with King Trailer ind. and with Timberland Ellicott Corp. before Eaton Corporation purchased Timberjack and named it the Forestry Equipment Division. The traditional color of all Timberjack products was a reddish orange. In 1992, the color was changed to green with black and yellow trim. John Deere purchased Timberjack and continued the green, black and yellow paint scheme. Timberjack was owned by the Eaton Corporation in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984 Timberjack made a

leveraged buyout A leveraged buyout (LBO) is one company's acquisition of another company using a significant amount of borrowed money ( leverage) to meet the cost of acquisition. The assets of the company being acquired are often used as collateral for the loa ...

from Eaton to become an independent company. Timberjack was acquired by FMG (ForestMachineGroup), owned by Finnish

Rauma-Repola Metso Oyj was a Finnish industrial machinery company focusing on providing technology and services for mining, aggregates, and oil and gas, recycling, pulp and paper and other process industries. On 30 June 2020, Metso's partial demerger and ...

. After a short period carrying the double-name FMG-Timberjack, in 1993 Timberjack became the brandname for the group. Other well known forest machine brands, which have been incorporated into FMG-Timberjack were Swedish Kockums, ÖSA and Bruun System as well as Finnish LOKOMO. In December 2000 John Deere bought Timberjack from Metso Corporation (formerly Rauma-Repola) for $570 million which also included the purchase of a separate company, Waratah, a leading manufacturer of heavy-duty harvester heads. As of June, 2006, at the forestry fair "Florence Wood", the Timberjack product line was discontinued, and John Deere, its parent company, became the largest single brand of forestry equipment. Its global market share for both cut-to-length and full tree equipment was very strong shortly after the acquisition.

References

External links

{{John Deere John Deere vehicles Log transport