The Official Work Pictures Thread

Interesting notch. Did it work?

Yes it worked. It had some side weight & sweep so I wanted it to stay on the hinge as long as possible, to stop it drifting towards the garden structures. I also left a decent thickness of hinge as I was concerned about the non vertical grain - good job too, as even though I had compensated I was only left with an inch or so left ( for scale the tree was a little over 30” at height of cut ). The open face was just to try and keep the stem coming forward & save the shrub at the side. Seemed a lot of work at the time but ended well.
 

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Yeah, see... Sean’s point was valid, but Pete knew where to stop his back cut.

I had been (though I forgot to say something) admiring Pete’s back cut since I saw it,for the loads of travel it affords.

Me personally... I LOVE me a gap when there’s no eccentric side-lean. I quit cutting the Sizwill recently. Smashed an expensive fence.:big-no:
 
Not meaning to come off as a dick @Jed but, did you learn something from this bad experience? I’ve mucked up plenty of times but I always go back and examine things to figure out why. Please elaborate so we all may further educate ourselves kind sir.
 
I quit cutting the Sizwill recently. Smashed an expensive fence.

:happy1:

Your post reminds me of the following-

Late 70's/early 80's, I was learning and doing treework in CT after gaining a lot of good cutting experience from logging in ME and CT. The guy I worked for was quite happy when I would semi -often walk up to a removal he had planned to climb and I would just cut it from the base, maybe with wedges. He would say, "YEAH, price it to climb... then CRASH IT." Lol.

So the point is, I had a lot of experience and some skill.

A new guy joined our crew and he had a lot of good experience too. If memory serves, I think I did most of the cutting but he was quite capable too.

I'll always remember this one job, we were removing a bunch of trees and this one tree kinda wanted to be cut from the base. But it was a big and tall white oak (maybe 22"x80') and it had a "weird lean" to it. I looked and looked and the lean just weirded me out, given the various targets and the required lay. I finally said nah, I can't cut this one. He stepped right up and said 'I think it'll go, I got it', and he proceeded to walk up to it, cut the perfect box (aka face) and backcut, and over she went, no muss no fuss, no rope, no wedges.

Of course White oak hinges like a door so that was a key factor but the main thing was just that what one person didn't feel was doable, another person had no problem with. Gotta love it.

Anyway, we all know Jed has sick cutting skills so I'd be interested to hear more about this fence that jumped in his way. His perception of what was possible evidently clashed with reality. Or maybe another cutter could have looked at it and said, Jedidah... just no! It aint gonna work!!
 
Richard and I have a veto policy.
If one of us say: no, can't be done!, that holds.
I must admit it has kept us from screwing up a few times.
Most memorable was a large ash in a castle park, that I wanted to climb and wreck out.
He vetoed it and said : " We'll fall it, if some of the scrubbery becomes collateral damage, so be it.
When that thing hit the ground, the top half of it completely disintegrated, total mushbag.
Taking it down from the top would not have ended well.
 
Yeah, see... Sean’s point was valid, but Pete knew where to stop his back cut.

I had been (though I forgot to say something) admiring Pete’s back cut since I saw it,for the loads of travel it affords.

Me personally... I LOVE me a gap when there’s no eccentric side-lean. I quit cutting the Sizwill recently. Smashed an expensive fence.:big-no:
Pete knows, just thought I'd worth mentioning for emulators.
 
That was a good tale Cory! I’ll try to tell the sizwill fail story this weekend... it’s gonna get pretty long-winded, and I’m on the go for the next three nights.

For now, suffice it to say that I shed a pretty thick layer of immaturity over that ordeal. Still got about a hundred layers to go.😂
 
Two crispy critter drop and walks today.
Only got picts of the last one. Both required guying and pulling. Got lucky on this one. Just a little itty bitty bit of wood for hinge. Pucker charge.
First one was an oak between two fences. Pulled the first fence down and felled it between posts. Pole sawed some problem low limbs and 4wd tugged her over. More holding wood in the dead oak than this pine. 36 Dbh 20210419_112124.jpg 20210419_112153.jpg 20210419_114607.jpg 20210419_114628.jpg 20210419_114631.jpg
 
You'd think they would eventually figure out, that trees simply can't grow down your way.

Nasty stuff, Stephen.
 
We had that happen with the Ferguson fire. Roman candles throwing fire in 60+ mph winds.
I can say when stacked proper, lit on fire, that tree would be mostly gone over night.
Yeah Stig. Its an ugly thing that could happen. But there are still stands left and oaks.
 
That's the worst driving grinder I've ever run. Twitchy track controls, almost like all or nothing. You want to go forward, but randomly it turns hard right and doesn't respond to correction. It also has a hard time turning in place, it just bogs a lot before finally starting to turn.

Way underpowered for that stump. There was an extra 2-3ft of trunk, but full of fencing and dirt between the root folds, so no cutting it shorter. It probably took 6hrs.

Actually I did cut a couple 8" thick half rounds off it. I had to cut one at first to have something to drive on to get the grinder wheel higher until there were enough chips to build a ramp.

It was super dry and dusty too.
 
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?
 
Good gawd. Though the writing style is totally different, I daresay Jed pens a tree cutting story on par with Gerry.

That post had it all- technique, history, pride, hustle, experience, real world job parameters, living life.

I was grinning ear to ear as I got into it.

yeah, rushing sucks. And when you rush and do something nutty and get away with it, that makes it even worse for next time when tempted or forced to rush
 
Shit happens Jed. If you aren't screwing up sometimes, you're underperforming. Good story :^)
 
Jack is a logger? Those fancy cuts are quite useful in the woods, and if they go wrong you break trees, but in a residential setting you need to focus on minimising risk because more costly things could get broken.
 
Jed, trees are living things ( Till we cut them down, anyway) they don't all behave in the same way.
3 days ago I felled a Norway spruce next to a 180Kv pover line.
It was tall enough to hit the live vires.
I was going to fell it not quite parallel to the line, but a bit a way from it.
Since it had a lot of branch weight towards the line, I set a whizzy to hold it on course.
Damned thing took of for the line and just missed it by a smidgeon.
Scared the crap out of me, truth be told.
Turned out there was a blob of rot in the whizzy side of my hinge.
Impossible to tell till it failed.

Took about half a day to clean that mess up, but at least I didn't turn myself into a grilled chicken.
 
Too many trees behind it for that.
We should have taken the top out, so it couldn't reach the lines.
But hell, it was an easy fell for me.
Except for the rot, of course.
 
Totally understand... easy shat is easy...until it is not. The "oh, fack" happens and is an awful feeling of dread. Glad you skittered by on that one.
 
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