I respectfully request information regarding your norway spruce cut..
That was an interesting cut..... I had taken most of the side-weight (limbs) off so it was a pretty straight stick, with just a little side weight..
The top of the tree was also gone, bombed out to fit the remainder in the DZ, and there may have been some backlean, but nothing too crazy....
High pull line at the top of the spar, with the stump grinder pulling, and not the regular op..... And there was a good bit of play in the DZ, so accuracy was not required....
SO the notch was made to the lay, which is as shown in the picture.. Notice the bent fiber on the row on the right... that was the hinge, and was bent as it went over... The row of fibers on the left is the......................................., actually it doesn't have a name just yet, so let's call it a slow release perpendicular back-strap...
That was accidentally formed as follows:
The bar was too short to make the full length of the hinge... rather than have to switch sides to reach around with the saw to cut the left side of the backs-cut, I like to remove part of the it on trees where that don;t have side weight and therefore don;t need the extra control from the full hinge. SO I reach around from the font of the notch and take off as much of the side of the hinge as needed to make sure the bar is longer than the hinge... And in this case I misjudged the distance needed and came up just a little short... leaving that perpendicular strap to hold...
What do you call that side cut taking out the far side of the hinge... an intentional dutchman... however its used simply for convenience and NOT to steer the tree... it can and will steer the tree off the lay, if left only on one side. I learned that lesson the hard way... So to make sure the tree does not go off the lay I will cut a similar sized dutchman on the near side.... this creates a balance, though the dutchmans' don't have to mach exactly.. the most important thing is to make sure the tree doesn't have enough side weight to cause the now severely compromised hinge to fail. Obviously using the skid steer for pulling is going to allow me to leave a fatter hinge that can somewhat make up for its greatly reduced length... but this cut is mostly just used for quick easy falls of straight sticks... Any question about losing the tree to side weight and I'll take the time to cut the hinge up proper from both sides. This falling cut was made with a 25" bar..
I will often use the same technique from the bucket when using a 16" bar.... It's particularly useful from the bucket when it's not just a matter of convenience, as the bucket can't reach the far side of the cut, and the DZs are not so forgiving..
On this one however I accidentally came up short on the far dutchy and ended up having to pull A LOT harder than I expected. The regular op would have known that the cut wasn't finished by feeling how much force was on the rope. But the new guy doesn't have a feel for it. After a minute and seeing how far he had moved without the tree budging, it was clear the cut had an issue... SO I took a little more out of the regular back strap.. I had misjudged that one too, as I thought it was finished, but obviously from the pictire it wasn't.. It didn;t take muc more cutting though and she let go, BUT she moved ever so slowly even with a lot of force on a high pull line..... the tree stopped at about 45 degress, and wouldn't move until those perpendicular fibers were completely torn out.. That was pretty cool to watch.. no video though.
That got me thinking about possibly using a perpendicular back strap to give some additional control, maybe slow the fall, or keep the fall in line wit the perpendicular strap when more control is needed to fight side weight or something.. The wheels are still turning
