Breaking Stig's Rules about making a face cut in 2 cuts

[lumberjack]

Just an idea.

Why don’t you start one thread with all your vids, rather than inventing reasons to post them all the time?
Keep them all in one place, like August does.

Then we’ll all know where they are and won’t miss any of them.

Excellent idea.

 

[murphy4trees]

I spend an extra minute to make this notch

then saved an hour on the clean up and lawn repair

That's a 28" bar

3" short for the notch

the intentionally high second cut takes about 20 seconds on average.

It's hard to understand how making such a quick and easy modification to the open face GOL teaching can inspire such anger and ferocity in the orthodox cutters here and elsewhere, like stig Burnham and Rico.

what's the down side?

I spent an extra 3 minutes for a day in which only 3 trees were dropped. it's so much easier to see what's going on and ensure a clean face.
The final undercut was made from one side so no walking around the tree. And no need to carry an ax, which would entail multiple minutes to handle over the course of the day.

simply, fast, effective, foolproof. how does that make me a hack?

 

[murphy4trees]

this is the internationally high second cut

 

[lxskllr]

Doing it in two cuts is more artful. At the end of the day, getting the tree down safely, however it happens is what matters most, but trying for perfection is a noble pursuit.

 

[murphy4trees]

Shigo urged the same thing when he said always shoot to make the target cut perfectly... That teaching is completely unrealistic and has continued to plague the tree care industry for over 40 years.

One of my clients, a surgeon, turned me onto this saying:

Perfection is the enemy of good.


It's actually more applicable to stump grinding, where it's often better to leave a little distance between the edge of the stump and the fence of driveway etc. than to falling.


To me, perfection is doing tree work the fastest, safest easiest way. If I was a faller, dropping trees all days every day, I would focus on saving an extra 20-30 seconds per cut, but when that time is almost irrelevant given the number of trees I actually drop, I AM much more concerned with falling accuracy, which allows me to drop trees that my competition is climbing, rigging, or craning. I've made a decent living doing just that for the last 20 years.

This cut does offer noticeable strength to the hinge which together with the pulling power of a high line and skid steer gives me the confidence to drop a good percentage of trees that I would otherwise not be able to chance. Being the only one in my market that has the ability to drop some hairy trees provides a good payday, and saved the client big money. There is some video of me doing this, but many more times that I didn't want the distraction of video when I need to focus on the cutting.

And as I have said before I have also developed cutting techniques that allow me to dop certain trees accurately and twice as fas as a skilled commercial faller like Stig.