TimberPro Brand Guidelines: Shawano Forest Machines, Part of Komatsu Since 2019

A logger from northern Wisconsin and a leveling cab.

TimberPro’s story starts with an earlier company. A history of the business by Dave Wester, published on TimberPro’s website next to a June 2007 Northern Logger article, tells how Pat Crawford grew up in Winter, a small town in northern Wisconsin, in a family that ran a logging camp. He worked in the woods with his father, cut timber in Montana and felled big trees in Oregon before returning to Wisconsin.

In 1963, the same history says, Crawford began logging for Menominee Enterprises near Shawano, and his family moved to the Shawano area that autumn. Logging led to building machines. After a period at a welding shop, he started another shop in Shawano with a former employee, Larry Klement, as his partner, and the history calls that “the real start of Timbco.”

Timbco’s idea was the leveling machine, a tracked carrier whose cab and boom stay level on a slope. Crawford’s first machines leveled in two directions. Visitors from Washington state told him they would buy one if it could level in four, and in April 1982, the history says, his first four-way leveling machine, using four hydraulic cylinders, was shown at a forestry show in Spokane. Later designs did the job with two cylinders and moved the engine.

For a time Crawford worked with Timberjack: he kept the rights to make six major components while Timberjack assembled and marketed the machines. The partners could not agree on who owned later design changes, the history says, and they split. Timberjack kept the engine-down design, and Timbco went on to build its engine-up machine on its own in Shawano, at one point building up to 250 machines a year.

The wheeled division that came home.

Larger companies came calling. Timbco had come to know Partek, which the history pairs with the Valmet name, through its sales in Australia, and in 2000 Partek bought Timbco. According to the company history, Partek was mainly interested in the tracked machines and the Timbco name, since it already had wheeled machines of its own, and Crawford kept an option to buy back Timbco’s young wheeled division within two years.

He used it. In July 2002, the history says, Crawford bought the wheeled division and started a new company, TimberPro, at first focused on wheeled forwarders and harvesters. The first months went into redeveloping the wheeled machines, and the first TimberPro feller buncher was designed, built and sold by the end of 2002. The same history describes a combination machine built as a forwarder with interchangeable heads, one for cutting and one for loading. Komatsu’s 2022 press release describes TimberPro as “established in 2002 and founded by the Crawford family.”

The range grew back towards tracks. When Komatsu America announced its agreement to buy the company in February 2019, Komatsu Forest’s press release listed TimberPro’s products as tracked feller bunchers and harvesters, forwarders, wheeled harvesters and felling heads. Today TimberPro’s own model list is organised by machine type: leveling and non-leveling track feller bunchers and harvesters, log loaders and forwarders. Model names pair letters and numbers, from the TL leveling track machines and TN non-leveling machines to the TF forwarders, and the site keeps a separate page of retired models.

TimberPro is a Shawano company in its own description and in the press. Komatsu’s 2022 announcement described the business as “a Wisconsin-based manufacturer of purpose-built forest machines and attachments” that sources materials from many companies in northern Wisconsin. Timber Harvesting magazine wrote that the Crawford family has been in the forestry business in Wisconsin for more than 75 years.

Design and documentation.

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.

A family firm inside a global group.

On 19 February 2019 Komatsu America Corp. announced a definitive agreement to acquire TimberPro Inc., with closing expected on 1 April 2019; Power Progress reported the deal the same day. Komatsu Forest said the purchase strengthened Komatsu’s position in the full-tree-length segment. Komatsu’s later releases state that TimberPro “was acquired by Komatsu in 2019.”

The name and the town stayed. In October 2022 Komatsu announced that TimberPro would add 48,765 square feet to its Shawano facility to double its production capacity, with occupancy planned for summer 2023; the release quoted Lee Crawford as TimberPro’s chief executive. Timber Harvesting later reported the expansion complete, marked by a public open house for employees, their families and the Shawano community, and wrote that TimberPro has remained in Wisconsin since the acquisition. TimberPro’s website still carries its own name and model list, with careers handled through Komatsu’s jobs site.

The family thread runs through the whole story: a logging camp in northern Wisconsin, a machine shop in Shawano, Timbco’s leveling machines, the sale to Partek, the buy-back of a single division and the new name that followed.

For a design guide, TimberPro shows how a small maker can keep its own name and home town after joining a global group. Compare Komatsu Forest, its sister forestry business inside Komatsu, and Komatsu, the parent group. For this guide we use jack pine green, sawdust and a tamarack gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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