So this is for Corey, Burnham, South Sound Sean and anyone else who could possibly take an interest in tree fallin, trick cuts, money and arrogance.
One or two of you on here will know that I absolutely venerate a certain faller known as Jack Bealer (hotsaws101 on YouTube). Years ago, in one of his videos, he highlighted a certain cut which was regionally known as the “Sizwill,” which he held to have a superior ability to hold/swing side-lean than a regular cut. I immediately ran out and tried it where I had no real targets, and was impressed beyond measure. The nasty little spruce had darn near pulled its roots out of the ground on the tension side of the hinge when the sizwill had been applied. “Wow. It works.” I thought; and I have applied it to most of my heavy side leaners since, and have also been most impressed with the heavy wood-pull that the cut seems to produce from the stump. So this was probably… like...about seven years ago, and I have used it religiously since… That is to say...all the way up to my fence smashing incident about three months ago.
So now I must fast forward to that particular job where I had, roughly 15 to 20 big-ish Firs to fall for a private land-owner. I should also mention that I work for a company called Eastside, where the average tree-guy is in his mid-20’s and where the jobs are bid for a foreman in his mid-20’s. Well, we old farts have a trick or two up our sleeves, and I quickly came up on so much time, that the job began to look like I was going to finish up about two days ahead of schedule. I should further mention, that this is largely because I had a certain Terry Sava running the Kabota for me, who happens, just happens, to be exactly my age. When I get around this guy… There is no other way to say it… My ego just goes to a different place. He, for whatever reason, super overrates my value as a Faller. And he is always encouraging me to just send it. “Come on!... you know you can make it!” he always says. Well, I took one look at the side leaning Fir toward the house, and realized he was right… I had this one. “I’ll crack a sizwill in, and just send it, and I know it will be fine.” Well that’s not quite true… I did first think that I should lash the butt of the tree to the stump with a bull rope so that it wouldn’t kick up on a hard swale in front of me.
Long story short… Rushing like a man out of his mind… I said, “Forget about the rope.” put a Sizwill into the face, put my back cut in, and then banged it over. I just sat there like an idiot watching the sizwill fail… All of those terrifying slow motion moments, where the tree just lurches farther and farther toward where it is not supposed to go. It actually grazed the fence post while it was falling. Then the butt kicked up a good 20 feet in the air because of the swale, and simultaneously kicked over a good 18 inches as it again fell and put a bad mash in the chain-link fence. I straightened the fence out as best I could, showed it to the homeowner, made a video about it for my bosses, and went home feeling about 2 inches tall. Long story short… That job ended up about $8000 ahead of schedule, so nobody said a single word to me about the fence. I don’t care though… I feel like an idiot all the same, it just seems so unprofessional to me to have been such an ass. That Sizwill still pulled mad wood from the stump, but I actually saw it twist and cave-in. I think a regular cut could have potentially been better on this one, but I don’t have the science to justify it. Out of all of this all I have really learned is that rushing is a bad thing, and tends to smash fences. A guy’s ego comes down a bit ya know?
That is what us mortals (lesser Vikings) use....
