Tree felling vids

cory said:
Maybe but normally its blamed on the rigging slinger ime
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If the hook picks a bad tail or bad road line we dog them. If the slinger did something dumb, well he blamed the hook but we all knew...
squisher said:
Sometimes it's no ones fault. I've worked many times where the tail hold would be guyed, sometimes with multiple guys. Same with yarder guy line stumps. Do whatever you gotta do to make it hold.
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Rather than guying the stump we usually took a round turn and then to another stump.
squisher said:
Ha ha ha. Oh I've seen cables fly, and it may have been my fault once or twice.

Wildest thing I ever seen was a guy run the turn(cycle of choked logs) right into the carriage. It was an intermediate setting so down over a 'hump' so the harder is out of sight and the yarderman is operating blind, depending on the hooktender. Well as the mainline snapped the hook tender had finally got the carriage to unclamp from the sky and that thing took off like a rocket downhill. Thank god I was off pre-rigging the next setting but I remember the noise of that carriage accelerating freewheeling down the sky and saw it hit the bottom spar tree and blow that tree apart. Oh man I thank my lucky stars I had nothing at all to do with that screw up. I asked the guy running the hill why he didn't reclamp to sky when he saw what had happened. He panicked he said. Lame.
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That's $30k!
One time I was towing the brush crew out and they had lunches, gas oil and a saw on the hook. The hook was 30 feet below the carriage and they were holding choker bells. The terrain got closer to the carriage so I changed clamps on the carriage to shorten up for a better angle and the skyline clamp missed the skyline! I know the sound of a free wheeling carriage! The crew split as the carriage went past and slammed into the hook in a puff of vapor everything on the hook disappeared except the mollies and the saw handle.... Whoops...
 
Honestly, that video made me feel lucky that I have always been a faller.
Put the trees on the ground, then let someone else deal with getting them to the deck.
 
I never saw a carriage go free but it must me nasty, all that steel careening down hill on greased steel wheels, get outta the WAAAYYYY
 
Runaway logs were the most unpredictable danger I faced on the hillside I think. So again on say an intermediate setting, were the ground goes out for always and then drops off steeper so you need an intermediate 'Jack' tree rigged that the carriage and lines can pass through, and when you're down below this you're out of sight of the yarder. So you've sent up a turn of logs and as the yarderman sets them down up top one or more get loose and start heading downhill. Now of course you'd try to set and rig to minimize this but sooner or later you're working in a spot with a crap landing for the yarder and no log break is gonna cut it.

So you're down below starting to pick your way in a bit to eye up the next turn and over the radio comes 'runaway' sometimes followed with a direction it's headed and let me tell yah, you'd better have it sorted ahead of time who's perspective you're using. Lol.

I've seen runaway logs blow stumps apart and explode into bits, I've seen them blow standing trees apart at the bottom of the block, I've seen them spear into the ground who knows how deep because even the harder couldn't pull them out just had to buck them off at the ground, I've seen them exit the bottom of the block and just keep going and going and going to where you're starting to wonder how far back the haul road comes around the bottom and if it could get a trucker. I watched a co-worker come so close to punching his ticket when we got the runaway call and my SOP was to run for my life. My buddy who was one of the bosses fell and when I looked back that log was coming right for him, he dove behind a stump and it piled into the high side of the stump stopping dead in its tracks. I still can't believe it didn't blow through that stump and wipe him out.

I feel blessed everyday to have survived a decade of logging with no major injuries. I've seen guys get forked right up before, it's a very dangerous game.
 
And I catch grief from the guy who wants to run the porty up tight to the tree under the rigged limb! Dangerous stuff you loggers deal with.
 
I couldn't believe the huge back-pack that that poor kid (or maybe that's where all that gym-muscle came from) hiked up the tree, just to bust a run-of-the-mill Red Cedar in half. Looked more like hippy, tree-sitter going up there to camp out. Darned kids.
 
Yah. I never had a pack. I wondered too when he spurred down what the dealio was with the pack. I never carried a climb line in the woods. Not once. We just didn't even have it. If it was a tall climb it just meant it was along ways up and back down. After monumental efforts on a hard rig I can distinctly recall getting jelly legs starting to jamb out on the way down.

And yah to whip up and pop a top to rig a spar would be minimal in residential work but still it's done in some very remote locations and along with all the other hard work. Those cables and blocks don't get to those trees by themselves. Most every camp I worked in had some sort of workout or weight room so those boys may be buffed up from 'the gym' but the bush isn't playing no small part in it either. I knew nothing of modern techniques until I found the Internet. SOP was a cable core flip line on a belt, with Spurs.
 
I remember learning to climb in the mid 70's...no life lines used then. Spur up, spur down. First day on the job as a "being tested" climber, they had me about 50 feet up a pine spraying nearby pines with a gas hose contraption shooting diesel fuel and probably a pesticide onto other pines to kill beetles. At least 95 degrees, hot, miserable, finally time to come down. I guess I got jelly legged and armed...there was a 3 strand line hanging by the tree and I grabbed it at some point on way down, unclipped lanyard and was using arms to help lower myself down (not a clue now why I unclipped my lanyard)...dehydrated, not thinking clearly. Something gave out and I dropped (seemed like 20 feet, couldn't have really been that far cause I didn't get hurt). I am sitting there in the pine duff, trying to decide if I'm OK and the boss says, "damn, I never seen it done like that."

Arse-hole:lol: I didn't laugh then...I do now. Can't believe they didn't fire me.
 
squisher said:
Yah. I never had a pack. I wondered too when he spurred down what the dealio was with the pack. I never carried a climb line in the woods. Not once. We just didn't even have it. If it was a tall climb it just meant it was along ways up and back down. After monumental efforts on a hard rig I can distinctly recall getting jelly legs starting to jamb out on the way down.

And yah to whip up and pop a top to rig a spar would be minimal in residential work but still it's done in some very remote locations and along with all the other hard work. Those cables and blocks don't get to those trees by themselves. Most every camp I worked in had some sort of workout or weight room so those boys may be buffed up from 'the gym' but the bush isn't playing no small part in it either. I knew nothing of modern techniques until I found the Internet. SOP was a cable core flip line on a belt, with Spurs.
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Freakin seriously hard work. Not many could or would want to handle it.

Crazy story, Gary!
 
Another Vimeo short;

https://vimeo.com/152240112

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/152240112" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="https://vimeo.com/152240112">Fallers</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user23818209">Benchmark Outdoors</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
 
Very cool vid...some crazy hard work going on there.

dang, some of those youngsters got some big guns, there arms as big as my thighs..lol
 
Damn those are some big heavy trees slipping off those stumps. Interesting wedge trick, sort of a portable snipe tool..
 
You can't leave a block of wood on the humbodlt to close up that side.

You might get a spin and different lay by doing either. Rarely, but sometimes, to clear another canopy or whatnot, you might need a tree to start heading at 12:00 early in the movement, but want it to end up at 1:00 or 11:00.

Its sorta like a Big-Green era Bonnervision double-hinge video of facing and pulling on one hinge, then re-facing above or below,and tipping a whole tree over into a lay with another hinge.
 
Hard to tell in the vid but it looked good. Just trying to break that side first.
Excellent vid
 
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