fat and old still getting the job done

murphy4trees

TreeHouser
Joined
Nov 28, 2008
Messages
4,102
Location
Philadelphia PA suburbs
Stig and all,

Big sugar maple removal in the front yard.. wide canopy hanging over service wires, street primary, house, and jap maple... Medium Norway maple in the wide open backyard.. Load and a half of chips which is something over 30 yards... all wood cut and piled by street for log loader pick up, both stumps ground and grindings moved to backyard wild area... 90 degree high and 85% humidity...4 man crew... median age 56...

When I started in this biz in 1982, if you were in your mid-thirties you were the old man on the crew..

then after the boys (actually old men) went home I stopped and sold a $425 stump grinding job, and finished all but one stump before dark... ate dinner on the way home and walked in the door at 9:55
 
One of my favorite long time (25+ yrs) clients shared an expression with me once.
"Strong like bull, smart like ox."
It comes up fairly often in this line of work. I use it on groundies all the time, but it can also apply to others.
 
I must be doing it wrong. I rarely work past 3:00 pm. Four days a week. One day for bids. Weekends for me and family.
 
... hmmm , an Ox is a Bull with it's balls cut off
Well, not exactly -- distinct species/breeds. You're thinking of a steer, no? I take a lot of identity in the ox team pioneer Conestoga wagon pullers. Get hitched & pull together!

Daniel, I'm curious about your stump job so as to compare our pricing to yours. I'm sure your cost of living is higher and expenses, too being on the East Coast. How many stumps was that? Type and predicted grind time? For us, we try to clear roughly $120/hr for grinding, so that'd be 3.5 hours, possibly 2-3 medium to big stumps with our machine, no root chasing.
 
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I do twice that or more when the stump work is lined up.... Not on this job though as I hooked him up. young family, working man, good guy... Contract called for leaving the grindings backfilled in hole, but we had the skid steer on sight and he had a place for them in the back yard so I threw it in N/C


I can grind a big 4-5' oak stump in 15 minutes with sharp teeth... I usually just backfill the grindings.. try to stay away from clean up, but will do it when the $ is right if that's what it takes to get the job..
 
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This one took 90 minutes.. without travel

One of my favorite long time (25+ yrs) clients shared an expression with me once.
"Strong like bull, smart like ox."
It comes up fairly often in this line of work. I use it on groundies all the time, but it can also apply to others.

Smart like fox???
 

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This stump was 2,000 plus 500 for clearing a bunch of small trees along the fence line... She had a spot in the back for the chips so the loader kept the grindings out of the way so the machine didn't bog down in 3 feet of chips. I'd grind for a few minutes, pull back and let the loader in... went a lot faster than I expected.. The guy in the picture was drivign by with a truck and chipper and we made a deal for the loader to move some chips on his job around the corner in exchange for him chipping the small trees.... I was planning on making an extra trip to chip so that saved us a lot of time..

Picture 1 was 2:49 pm

picture 3 was 5:50 pm so three hours
 

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This one went faster than I thought too..
It was 40 minutes travel time each way. We had to haul the grindings.

I was expecting to have to grind through the fence post but the stump was soft enough that the skid steer just ripped it out.. I did hit metal with the saw after whittling it down to pic 2

First pic was taken 4:54
last pic 6:07

so a little more than an hour.. job was 1500
 

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Nice work, Daniel. Thanks for posting the great photos. Very clear, well-shot images. I have lately been wondering about the logistics of owning big equipment like most professional arborists do. Do you have to pay for a separate storage facility just to hold all of the equipment needed to do the work? Do you feel that the storage facility is secure enough?

I hate reading about it when guys get hit by dirt bags that have followed them to see where they keep all of their equipment, and then come back later and clean the place out. It is a real punch in the gut. Thanks for sharing any thoughts you have on these issues.

Tim
 
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A lot of the men here don't approve of my use of skid steers....

Joke was on them the whole time....

When I was in my 20's and thirties I could make a living on hard work... times have changes.. to stay competitive you need the hardware...
Everyone gets to find their own niche.... I can't speak to the security issues where you are from.. you can always get GPS installed and put up a geo-fence around the equipment... Finding a good yard is a lot harder than it used to be: though most security issues in this industry are internal...

Obviously not all jobs are going to go like the above. I do alright on the jobs that no one else wants to touch... and work on short notice... it's all backed up by an effective marketing program.... No one is going to spend 69K on a stump grinder if they don;t have the work for it. I have three RG-100's... One is paid for, one has less than a year, the other less than 2 years of payments due.
 
I don’t think peeps disapproved of the skid, just that you’d get all technical about your super directional cutting whilst using all those horses on the line.
 
So are the treads worn slick, or did they come that way to save yards? I wonder how that would perform on a mini skid. It would probably be hard to control or loose a lot of pulling power
 
Nice photos Daniel. I take my hat off to you guys that do stump grinding. I never had and never will do them. Just not my cup of tea, but I really do like it when they are all ground out on a job!
 
Thing was, every time he reached a profit margin with one of his grinders they either blew up or hit something in a stump that caused massive total destruction. The last one did both of those immediately following a $12,000 fix.
 
I thought the same thing, too, but then most of the cost of repairs on his machines came as a result of not checking around the stump for metal before starting the job. For instance, "what can a 30 foot long by 1 inch diameter choker cable do to a stump grinder running at full-bore? Run for your life! Self-destruction in the works.
 
I was up in a a tree working away, whistling and enjoying myself, when suddenly the damnedest noise arouse. I looked out to see my friend Jim Ponce running for his life, whilst his grinder proceeded to beat itself to death with an old buried choker cable.

I swear, when a choker cable reaches the end of it useful life it always ends up on top of or next to a stump. Least in my neck of the woods, anyway.
 
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