Tree felling and stump pulling bloopers.....

Watch out for windmills.....

 

I've watched some of those before . Theres some really WTF moments in there . That tree cutting looks easy on TV .

 

And more wimmins and beer for the rest of us!!

 

On some of those you just gotta wonder if the folks ever heard of cutting a wedge out on the side you want the tree to fall. On the one where it hit the house in the snow a blind man could see the lean of the tree was going to drop it in one direction....... on the house. To be fair though no matter how good you are there are times when things just go wrong. I have cut thousands of trees and am real good at dropping them where I want them. Yet managed to take out one of my hen houses a few years back when a 52" diameter red oak with lots of lean away from the coop hopped the stump pivoted around and fell the exact opposite direction of where it should have landed........ Yes many hens were harmed in the felling of that tree, believe I counted 100+ that got squished. Mr. Murphy at his finest that day Had more than a few of those splitters over the years where half the tree goes one way and the other half goes the other way and a few where the tree was so rotten inside it came mostly straight down. On the other hand I have seen way too many people cut a tree down from the base when they should have either climbed the tree, used a bucket truck or broke out a track hoe with a thumb and just pulled the tree out. Never an excuse for hitting a power line. And who in the hell parks their vehicle right next to a tree they are cutting down! I am a firm believer that a training and safety class should be required before most people are allowed to purchase a chainsaw. Saw a guy cut a spring log a while back that literally took his head off, big tree he cut fell over a smaller tree and he was cutting the smaller trees base, when the little tree released its pressure it came up with all the energy of a catapult and hit him right under the chin and threw him a good 100 feet away with only a few pieces of meat and tendons holding his head onto his body............ just a stupid stupid STUPID way to die. There is a reason why lumberjacking and timber work is listed as one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

 

My Grand Dad was one of those experts who could drop a tree exactly where he wanted every time, His secret was to cut just enough for it to stay in place and wait for the winds to drop to nothing, then make the last bit of a cut and let her go! Never had one go bad or miss his mark! Now other things he was more Red Neck, like deciding to remove a stump from out in front of the barn, using Dynamite! It helps that he spent his teens on the mountains felling trees for a living, he learned from the best there ever was!
Basically the exact opposite of all those idiots!

 

I cut wood every year and have learned a thing or two about dropping trees. I have had few things happen that were oh sh!t moments. I had my saw get pinched in a huge tree that wanted to fall the other way. Got saved by a gust of wind. I had my saw get launched about 20 feet once when a tree snapped. I also had a top hit me in the head damned near knocked me out.

 

@Thunder5Ranch "no matter how good you are there are times when things just go wrong."
Ain't that the truth. I've gotten pretty good at falling over the years, mainly because I've had the poop scared out of me. So, I show every tree respect, to put it mildly. The last time things went off the tracks was a few years ago with a smaller tree, a leaner. The lean was goin in the same direction I wanted so I started to make the face cut and - away she went. Caught me completely by surprise. It did a sort of a corkscrew and went about 90 degrees from the direction I wanted and fell on my fence. Luckily the fence is wire so it didn't do much damage but man-oh-man it scared the hell out of me. What had happened was the tree was rotten inside and I didn't see it. I felt the lack of resistance to the saw about the same time it took off. I learned a hard lesson that time and was lucky. It's a lesson I haven't forgotten either.

As far as pulling stumps, I don't bother unless I have to. I drill holes in them and let them rot in a couple years.

 

My worst one was on a fire in Colorado, Great big mature Pine, I ran the face cut, drove the wedges and was running through the felling cut and she split, barber chaired up about 25 feet, I heard the cracking and basically let go of the saw and ran for it, she came down and then bucked back toward me a good 20 feet, the face basically was a leaf spring, drug the whole thing right at me! once she came to a stop I then had to figure out how to buck it, that's when the winch and sand anchor came out and i yanked it off and let it crash where it wanted! I ended up just leaving it after clearing the limbs and finishing it off so I could get my wedges back!
My first Barber Chair, and it scared the snot out of me!

 

I met an arborist once , got to talking to him after watching him do his inspections on a project I was on . Every tree he went to that was scheduled to be taken out , he would take his hammer and tap around the base of the tree . Said he wouldn't even think about cutting the tree till he checked to see if it was hollow . For those that don't know , smacking the base of a tree with a hammer , most times if you hear a hollow sound , the tree is rotten and hollow in the middle . And that's an added danger .

 

Hollow trees are dangerous as hell, those are always the splitters and the straight down crashers. Dead trees with a lot of limbs are right up there as well amazing how the vibration of the saw or the drop after the finale cut can make some respectable limbs drop from high up right on top of you. People laugh at me for wearing a hard hat when I am cutting........... I have a 6" scar on the top of my head from one of those limbs that laid me wide open, when I thought hard hats when cutting trees down was fer sissies.

 

Cutting trees and electricity have one thing in common.
Work with both long enough and you will get bitten.

 

Sometime next week I'm going to be helping a friend cut down a dead tree with a few hangers in it as well . It definetly pays to have an extra set of eyes when cutting those trees .

 

It is all about making the hinge, but if you can't make a hinge you have a widow maker .
Dad taught me several techniques for bringing down trees even in some cases making a twist in it's fall to avoid hanging up on other trees.
Using an ax or a saw the techniques are the same for the hinge.
Dead and hollow trees are going to fall by the volume of the weight of the limbs. best you can do is rig a cable to alter the influence ,or in real tight circumstances . trim off limbs as you ascend and drop biscuits as you descend.

 

I got all these damn Jack Pines/Lodge Pole Pines and the problem with this type of tree is the it grows as fast as a weed but its root structure is shallow. So, these things grow up everywhere, fast and tall, stealing the sun and nutrients from my White and Red Fir and Blue Spruce trees, all my pretty trees, and then fall over busting my pretty trees... Anyway, I have so many trees to cut that I don't play around with them anymore, no wedges or etc. I tie a 3/4 inch arborist rope (called a Bull rope) as high as I can get it, hook it to the truck and pull in direction I want the fall. If it is dangerous (and most of these Jack Pine are bad leaners because so tall and no roots), I won't even put a back cut in them or just a small one then let the truck pull them over. It don't take much.