Cranes, as much as I love them, they can eat up a lot of a customer's tree removal budget, so my main man and I, on jobs that we might have gone to crane aided removals before, are trying other ways to get the trees down. An interesting job came up today, one part being an Acacia around some vacation homes and over electric lines. It had lost it's top and mainly had one large limb over the neighbour's roof. No place to flop it. It wasn't a very large tree, around 12" at the base, and being a good bending wood like Acacia, we could pull it away from the neighbours house with an endless line puller before doing any cutting, but still couldn't drop the limb because of the electrics and lots of plants below. Not a good climbing situation either.
We stuck a pulley in a close by adjoining taller tree and ran a line through it and connected below on the Acacia, so the tree was held in place and we could cut it off the stump. Another endless line puller was attached through that pulley in the adjoining tree above, to hold the Acacia upright. Nice thing about the endless cable pullers is that you can back them off very slowly and keep very positive pull. Taking a length off the bottom of the tree, we could slowly lower it, then repeat a few times, and the tree became light enough to turn the limb away from the electric lines, and just keep cutting from the base and lowering. It worked out real well, and in the right circumstances that method seems to offer a potentially usable option. I've never held a cut tree up in the air like that before, and obviously you are limited by the weight your rigging will allow. Pretty interesting, anybody ever do that method to get trees down in confined and delicate areas, lowering the whole thing slowly from above? Praise again to endless line pullers. If you are doing a lot of pulling, they are a very invaluable tool. Seem to be using them on most every job without a crane these days. On this job a GRCS might have worked real well also, haven't got one though.
