Good to read you again Tim, welcome back. I do have an actual stien arbor trolley, and despite having everything to build one from scratch i bought it. It is perfectly designed, and anything i would have built would have been inferior. I've owned it for years now, and since i lack a mini or other machine for moving stuff the arbor trolley is one of my most important tools. I've never once regretted the price, it's made me money. When paired with a log arch the arbor trolley makes moving stuff by hand as easy as it can be without an engine doing the work, and if you can figure out a small tow vehicle like a riding mower you'll really do well. You can pile all sorts of weight on it, but dragging it to the truck can still be a quite a workout because it's still you that is moving the stuff.
I'm part time, so investments in my tree business are competing with other stuff, and since i got sick taking out loans for stuff is a hard no right now. I've decided to build some winching setups to help move material, and so I'm interested in using my existing arch and arbor trolley with a winch providing the grunt. My chipper is an 80s chipmore chuck and duck, so if the branches were trimmed to fit the trolley they were sized perfectly for the chipper. I've since shimmed the anvil up, which allows it to "slowly" eat long leaders whole that would bog it down too much before, so I've decided a chipper winch setup is a good step forward, saving a bunch of hand work cutting and stacking branches and allowing me to pull whole leaders to the chipper. The arch will work great when winching logs, apparently you can set them up where the toggling motion acts as a brake so winching actually works ok, but i figured the trolley wouldn't be so easily adapted. Still better than nothing tho.
So basically yeah, the trolley is a great tool, but it costs roughly what 2 to 3 payments on a mini or something would be. It's a cheap way to increase productivity over having nothing at all, but it is a poor replacement for actual iron. But i doubt you will regret owning one, if you only use it every so often on a backyard nightmare you can't get the mini to it'll pay for itself, and since it's so easily to carry on the chipper tray it'll find itself on every job i do.
