Too busy for pics (too bad, they woulda been good), but we removed a 3 trunked big leaf maple today.....a long drag around the house and down a couple rockery levels, so I had 4 groundies. We had a good rigging point that allowed swinging most everything into a good drop zone. Some long limbs required GRCS tensioning to reduce the swing and drop. And I lowered some of the leaning wood with the GRCS. Hill wasn't real steep, though the house was below, so was able to drop the bottom 10-15 feet of each lead (we left 10 foot high snags) Only 6-8 yards of chips. Wish we'd gotten pics or vids...some of those limbs swung a good 60 feet, before swinging back and stabilizing, so they could be brought all the way down. It was a little too trick to try to swing them straight to the ground....woulda been cool if they coulda done that...only worked a couple times...like on the 7 incher when they told me they'd just hold the rope, no P-Wrap....wrong, it was too heavy and one guy held on and went in and up 10 feet or so...as the limb was coming down almost on him.....I knew I shoulda told them to take a wrap...but anyhow, all was good, no one hurt.
I had it brushed out in 4 hours, then only needed 2 helpers to rig and drop the wood, which took a couple hours. I should have bid it a tad higher, at $2500 or so, but had no problem at $2k.....STP bid $7000!!!! and added $3k to haul the wood, which we bucked and left to be given away....sometimes even good companies that normally are rather fairly priced blow their bids.
The tree did look intimidating, being on a hill above the house...and had two leads already cut, so at ground level, it was easily 7 feet across.
Last year, for this customer, I'd looked at an intimidating black cottonwood, that had had failures onto his house as well as the neighbor's. It had no real top, and a long lead going out way above the primaries. THe pwr co wouldn't trim it as it wasn't within 10 feet.....I never got back to him with an exact bid. He had a semi bozo outfit do the job, and it took them ages to finish it...maybe a month...guess they came back several times...but no one was hurt,nor was any property or wires damaged. They did leave the snag at 60 feet, which is way too high...and it jus tnow sprouted a bit. So he wished he'd presssured me for the job...and wanted me to have first crack at the maple...so I gave him a good deal....