Logset Brand Guidelines: Norcar Roots, Koivulahti & Black Machines

A new company in an old factory.

Logset is a Finnish maker of forestry machines at Koivulahti, in the municipality of Mustasaari near Vaasa on Finland’s west coast. Finnish Wikipedia gives its founding year as 1992 and describes it as a maker of harvesters, harvester heads and forwarders, all made at the company’s own factory.

The factory is older than the company. Forest Machine Magazine, reporting on a visit in December 2024, wrote that Logset’s history goes back to 1976, when production began under the Norcar name, and that Ab Logset Oy was formed in 1992 and still works in the same premises; the magazine noted the Norcar door handles still on the main entrance. Logset tells the same story on its own website, saying that its history comes from Norcar and that its first machines were green, like Norcar machines of the 1970s.

The link with Norcar is still part of the company’s service business. In October 2022 Forest Machine Magazine described a celebration at Logset’s service headquarters in Vanha Vaasa for a Norcar 600 forwarder that had reached 80,000 working hours; the owner had bought it from Logset in 1999. The magazine reported that Norcar built 500 machines in total, that one of the last was made in 1991, and that Logset’s service department has looked after them since the company started in 1992.

Finnish Wikipedia says Logset, which is based in Mustasaari, belongs to the Pilomac group. It also says the company’s dealer network covers 20 countries and that, besides service and spare parts, it offers operator training and other customer support.

Harvesters, forwarders and heads.

Logset builds the three main kinds of machine used in cut-to-length forestry. Forest Machine Magazine reported in December 2024 that the company made seven harvester models and seven forwarder models, covering work from first thinning to clear felling, as well as harvester heads. The model names are short codes: Finnish Wikipedia explains that the letters GT stand for “generation two,” and that the GTE harvesters run on eight wheels rather than six.

The range includes the 5F GT, which Finnish Wikipedia calls Logset’s best-selling forwarder in Finland, the smaller 4F GT, and two hybrid harvesters, the 12H GTE Hybrid and the 8H GTE Hybrid, both named by Forest Machine Magazine in 2024. In June 2025 Logset said the 4F GT had become the last forwarder in its line-up to receive its 3.3 update package, with a heavier-duty bogie able to take 24-inch wheels.

Harvester heads are made in the same factory. In August 2021 Forest Machine Magazine reported that, during spring 2021, Logset had invested in new harvester-head assembly space at Koivulahti, raising production capacity by 50 per cent, with a testing station next to the assembly line where each head is set up and calibrated before delivery. The magazine noted two control systems on the test bench: TOC-MD 2 for heads fitted to harvesters and Logset MDX 2 for heads fitted to excavators, so the heads are sold both on Logset machines and as attachments.

Logset has also been modernising how it runs the business. In February 2026 the company said it had gone live with Infor’s product-lifecycle software after introducing Infor’s CloudSuite enterprise system. In March 2026 it announced that its chief executive, Ron Back, had stepped down after seven years and would stay on as an adviser, with Pascal Réty as acting chief executive; the announcement, which quoted the board chairman Tapio Nikkanen, also mentioned a factory renovation project under way.

How forestry machine makers present themselves.

Forestry machine makers sell to a small, expert audience: logging contractors, forest companies and the operators who spend long shifts in the cab. Their imagery follows the work. Harvesters and forwarders are photographed in snow, in dense spruce stands and on soft ground, often from low angles that show the crane, the wheels and the load together, and many makers give equal space to the view from the operator’s seat: the cab interior, the controls and the screens of the measuring and control systems.

Paint does much of the branding. Machines are usually finished in a single strong colour, whether yellow, green or red, and makers tend to keep it through mergers and new names. When Komatsu Forest’s machines dropped the Valmet name in 2011, the company said their red would stay, the timber-trade news service Lesprom reported.

Many of these brands are tied to particular towns. In Finland and Sweden the factory and the head office often sit in the same place, sometimes in the community where the business began: Ponsse still builds every machine in Vieremä, in Northern Savonia, and Komatsu Forest has both its headquarters and its manufacturing in Umeå, in northern Sweden, according to the companies. Founding stories, early machines and local workshops feature prominently in their own histories.

The trade meets at working demonstrations rather than in showrooms. Fairs such as FinnMetko in Finland and Elmia Wood in Sweden bring makers, contractors and machines together, and makers time launches and road shows around them: Ponsse says almost 30,000 visitors came to Metko in 2008, and that an international tour in 2007 ended at the Elmia fair in Jönköping. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are made.

From Norcar green to machine black.

Logset has written down the history of its own colours. In a post titled “New colors for the Logset machines,” published in March 2023, the company traced the route from green to black. Its machines were green from 1992 to 2005, following the Norcar machines of the 1970s. In 2006 it introduced the Titan series in a modern grey, and the company says the Titan’s arch-shaped cabin drew wide attention in the trade. With the GT series of 2012 the bonnet and sides took on more black while the cabin stayed grey, and in 2017 the cabin turned black too, when, the company says, people were already talking of a “black edition.”

The anniversary year settled it. For its 30th anniversary in 2022 Logset built harvesters and forwarders in an all-black finish with gold decals, shown to the public at the FinnMetko exhibition in August 2022. The company’s anniversary page described black rims and engine covers set off with chrome and gold, and said the idea came from customers in Canada and the United Kingdom who had made their own all-black Logset machines. Each anniversary machine came with a Logset X Aarni wristwatch with a strap of real oak, which the company calls a Finnish product.

The anniversary edition was meant to last a year, but Logset kept the colour. Its March 2023 post said that harvesters and forwarders would keep the black body as standard, while the rims would go back to grey and the decals to purple, “like Logset brand asks for,” giving a slightly lighter result. The same post ties the colour change to the company’s slogan, “Simply Better.”

The company presents the change in branding terms: the post says the new standard colours will take Logset branding “to an even further level,” and describes the look as modern and aggressive. Black body, grey rims and purple decals are therefore the colours Logset itself names as its standard, and its website offers versions in Finnish, Swedish, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

For a design guide, Logset shows how a machine maker can turn its paint history into a brand story. Compare Ponsse, another Finnish harvester maker, and Valtra, a Finnish machine brand with its own colour story. For this guide we use black, grey and a purple with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Logset’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.