Whizzy

[Jed]

Yeah Willie: Like NeTree said: same principle as the swing Dutch. I believe Mr. Beranek referred to this in the Fundamentals as the "Gapped Obtuse Snipe," or am I the one who's obtuse? To me, for the average arborist, all of these techniques are a shade disappointing when you put them to the test--like leaving more holding wood in the tension side of the hinge: who ever noticed a fig of difference? The only thing that ever helps is a retainer line in the tree secured 90 degrees to the direction of fall. This stuff works in the woods where there's nothing to break and the trees aren't leaning all that severely--like your awesome "soft dutchman" guy. Why don't you throw up that link for the rest of the inbreds to watch? He seems like the coolest guy.

 

[sotc]

It's been up here before not that it isn't still a great show

 

[stig]

This stuff works in the woods where there's nothing to break and the trees aren't leaning all that severely-

I don't know what the forests around your place looks like, here we get plenty of leaning trees.
As for "nothing to break" , try busting up a few prime veneer logs and see how fast they'll kick you out of the woods.
Not to mention scraping the next generation of logs up, by falling stuff into them.

It is a myth,probably perpetuated by arborists, that we can just let trees fall any which way they want in the woods.

 

[SouthSoundTree]

It is a myth,probably perpetuated by arborists, that we can just let trees fall any which way they want in the woods.

Wait, you don't chop 'em with your ax and have Babe, the Big Blue Ox skid them out?

(Stig, do you know about Paul Bunyan?)

 

[stig]

Of course I do.
Remember, I've been trying to pass myself off for an American for years

 

[Burnham]

or am I the one who's obtuse? To me, for the average arborist, all of these techniques are a shade disappointing when you put them to the test--like leaving more holding wood in the tension side of the hinge: who ever noticed a fig of difference? The only thing that ever helps is a retainer line in the tree secured 90 degrees to the direction of fall. This stuff works in the woods where there's nothing to break and the trees aren't leaning all that severely--.

Jed, I like you, and enjoyed our conversations at the Flipfest...but this is some of the most inaccurate silliness I recall having read here in recent times.

I don't know what the forests around your place looks like, here we get plenty of leaning trees.
As for "nothing to break" , try busting up a few prime veneer logs and see how fast they'll kick you out of the woods.
Not to mention scraping the next generation of logs up, by falling stuff into them.

It is a myth,probably perpetuated by arborists, that we can just let trees fall any which way they want in the woods.

I couldn't agree more with Stig.

In my work as a faller, pretty much specializing in hazard tree fells, if I don't put the tree where I want it, often in a little slice of a gap in the stand crowns, I'm real likely to break something...me.

or am I the one who's obtuse?

I guess the answer might be, "Yes".

 

[MasterBlaster]

Har!

 

[stig]

I had a chance to experiment with the whizzy today.
And had the camera in the truck, too.

We are felling medium sized beech. We only buck them till about 10" the tops are then forwarded out and chipped.
So we have to avoid dumping tops on the skidder trails.

In order to do that, I had to put this tree right next to another.
Since it had a lot of branches on the side towards the other tree, I wanted to "roll" it off that tree as it came down, to avoid scraping the bark off a future log and leaving a mess of branches hung up over the log, I had to buck. ( that is an excellent way to get hurt, as I proved so well last season!)

So I used the whizzy to avoid having the tree follow the lean ( the lean was more pronounced than it appears in the picture, because the log was curved) and to induce roll I bored the hinge and set a step dutchman.

It worked just fine.
The tree rolled off the standing tree and as it hit the ground, the weight of the branches made it rotate back into it's original position.
Broke a few branches off the standing tree, but didn't scratch it at all, even though the log ended up laying righ up against it.

Tearing the bark of of future logs ruin them and is very much a no-no here.
I usually to refer to it as " apprentice rash".

 

[digga]

intresting learning something new all the time on here

 

[sotc]

Your gonna confuse people with your butress face cuts

 

[stig]

You're right.
If there had been more sidelean to compensate for, I'd have made the stump higher to be sure of getting straight grain.
You can see that the grain runs forward in the right side of the hinge, which is why I made it soo thick.

 

[woodworkingboy]

Nice job, Stig. I think that one photo can be called the current definitive picture of the whizzy.

Do you aim for an even back cut with that technique, or not so particular?

 

[stig]

If I want a tree to be able to roll of another one, I always aim for the same height in both face and backcut.
I've torn large chunks out of logs when not doing that, because if the backcut is higher, the hinge will get stuck against it as the tree rotates.

 

[woodworkingboy]

Faster fall with an even back cut makes sense.

 

[gf beranek]

Ah,, wood fiber.. you got to love it. I sure wish I knew as much about it 40 years ago as I do today. But hey! the young'uns are finding this stuff out early on from us. So there is hope that the knowledge we worked so hard to learn wont be lost,, and have to be learned all over again.

 

[woodworkingboy]

That is so spot on, Jerry. Once the lineage of traditionally passed along skills gets broken, that is knowledge via experience, it is difficult to bring it back. Often a different thing from regular school education. Long live experience!

 

[canadiantreeman]

Dang Stig, thats a precision fall right there! Very cool office, sir.

 

[stig]

Ah,, wood fiber.. you got to love it. I sure wish I knew as much about it 40 years ago as I do today. But hey! the young'uns are finding this stuff out early on from us. So there is hope that the knowledge we worked so hard to learn wont be lost,, and have to be learned all over again.

Jerry, one thing that I have found out is that teaching felling tecniques to others, makes me think a lot more about what I'm doing, fiber- and otherwise.
When I have to verbalize stuff that I'd normally just do by instinct, it forces me to really think it through and that in turns gives me a better understanding of what happens as the tree falls.
The same would be true for writing a book about it I am sure.

 

[stig]

Just a follow up.
I have had a few more chances to test this tecnique, and Anders have tried it out on a couple of tricky sideleaners, too.
We both agree; this cut really works.

With the low stumps that we set, one has to be extremely aware of how the fibers run, but even with that caveat, it allows us to throw a tree away from the lean, like nothing else, I've come across.

I really owe you one for passing this on, Willie.

( So anytime you want to learn how to fell a tree with a bar that'll only reach through about 1/3 of the diameter of the tree, just let me know)

 

[Burnham]

Thanks for the report, Stig. I'm gonna have to give it a try. What sort of dimensions have y'all found to be effective, in terms of percentage of width of hinge, and depth below the apex of the flat and angled face cuts?

 

[stig]

As for the vertical cut in front of the hinge, I just make it a bar's width. Making it less would be tricky!
On any tree that I want to manipulate, I'll usually gut the hinge with about 30%.
My theory is that istead of a whole tapered hinge, where both sides are sort of fighting against each other, making two separate blocks with no connection, will allow them to work better.

I'm still very much in the learning process with this. I've only used it maybe 5 times.
What sold me on it, before trying it out, was Jerry's post about how a block undercut gives you the strongest fibers to hold the tree.

Viola! though I, what we have here is ½ a block undercut. must work better than my beloved German.
And that seems to be true,
It is, however, also more time consuming to set up, than the German, so I'll only use it for those special situations.

But since those of us who fell to scale are a minority here, it could well be a VERY useful thing for a lot of people.

More pictures will follow, as I keep experimenting with it.

I*m sure that with the high stumps that you set, it'll work even better.

We have to be VERY carefull about fiber runoff, since the higher the hinge, the more that affect the outcome.

 

[Burnham]

Seems like you could easily make the block less that the bar width, Stig. Obviously the bore to set it will be that dimension, but then you could just bring the horizontal cut in not as far down. It would be like taking out the whizzy block and leaving a shallow german cut below it. Not to say there'd be any good reason to do so.

Anyway, something tickled my mind about the whizzy when Willie first put up this thread. Today I found it in the archives. I posted a thread about working with a pair of wise old custom cutters working on a hazard tree removal project a couple of years ago. That's the thread where we first started talking about the bore below the apex of the face cuts that you call a german cut.

I looked it up, and heckfire, right there in my own words I reported that that sawyer who used the bore, told me that "if you take a block out there, it works even better". That's got to be a whizzy he was talking about.

Here's a quote from that thread, my post:

"...When I asked him about the bore, he didn't go into an explaination of how it worked, he just said something like "makes the hinge hold better on that side". He also said, "if you take a block out right there, it'll hold even more". It took me about half an hour of chewing it over in my mind to figure out WHY it worked...but I'm pretty sure I have it right. "

Here's a link to the whole thread...we talked about the bore, aka german cut, between posts #9 to about #50, though we derail off and on .

http://gypoclimber.com/showthread.php?11056-Hazard-tree-contract-fallers

That was a great thread, btw. A worthwhile read and fine pics for some of the newer members, perhaps.

 

[stig]

There is nothing new under the sun, I guess.

I enjoyed rereading that thread, one of the better ones, indeed!

 

[sotc]

Good stuff, I still haven't tried it

 

[stig]

Used it again today. Tried to get a sideleaner to slip behind an oak instead of falling across the road. The guy who runs the skidder is on vacation, so we would have had to clear the road by hand.

Notice that it actually pulled the rootflare out of the ground instead of the hinge breaking.

I'm really loving this cut