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It is good to be afraid of your chainsaw. I consider that to be showing it the proper respect. It is way too easy to really hurt yourself with a chainsaw. I am also fearful of my radial arm saw and I always practice my best safety habits with these two tools.
Once the tree is down, if you are planning to make it firewood, I came upon a technique of my own devising for splitting large trunks. I had the trunk chainsawed to the correct length and then I stood them up and made small 1"-2" deep grooves in a cross pattern so my wedge would have a good starting position for splitting. So in the center of the log section make your first groove cut. then perpendicular to that, in each imaginary semi-circle make a groove. Huge help in splitting, especially a hard wood like Oak.

Jim

Ya ya ya…been dere and dun dat.
Tree was big enough that I could not get my arms around it.
Dead a long time.
Did the angle cut, didn’t really care which way it fell, as I’m in the woods behind my house.
Cut the opposite side and the saw got wedged.
Back to the house for wedges and a hammer.
Freed the saw and completed the cut (going on 2 hours now).
Tree breaks loose, but doesn’t fall due to all the top branches inter tangled with all the trees around it.
Tree slides off the stump, still vertical, and falls straight down, re planting itself perfectly.
And I ain’t starting over.
This happened 15 years a go, and when I walk my dog past that sonofabitch, I hear a low, but distinct laugh. It mocks me.

You made out better than a friend of mine. He calculated everything (being an engineer), had pulling lines through the branches, did the cuts, drove the wedges, and the tree decided to do the unexpected. It fell in another direction, taking out the 13.2kV top transmission line, the lower voltages, telco and cable TV. The dropped 13.2 arced through the guy wire anchoring a pole, and started a brush fire. Late afternoon on a weekend, there’s no power for the traffic signal at the corner of his property, and because the phone is out, he has only one method for initiating action. He has to pick up the radio in his truck and announce to the entire system what he’s done-he was an engineer for the local power company! Every trouble man and line crew in the area just had to come over to rag on him. :smiley:

You know, if it’s not REAL big, felling a tree with an axe is pretty satisfying.

And, the slow pace of it doesn’t really alow for big time mistakes.

But, I’ve never chopped down anything over, say, 8-10" in diameter either. And, most (but not all) of that was just being a destructive kid with an axe in the woods.

Well, the rope puller has to be smart enought to know to run at a 90 degree angle from the tree target line. You may not be qualified for this job.

Every tree I ever brought down had rope tension on it to “coax” it into the right spot. Sometimes I was the cutter, sometimes I was the puller. Most times the cutter would call off the puller before the tree leaned more than 5 degrees. The puller had plenty of time to not only get away from the tree but also sit down and watch it fall from a safe distance.

At least I am smart enough to remember what forum I am posting in.

Well, see, there’s the problem in your friend’s case. The engineer draws up the plans to fell a tree, then the people that actually are doing the felling discard all the illogical and impractical ideas from the engineer and do it correctly. :smiley:

I’m really lucky in this instance because A) I don’t have to mess around with the chainsaw, because Mr. Chainsaw Dude is going to take care of that part; B) the trees in question are not that big, largest is about 12" diameter or so at the foot–they’re just tall whippy cypresses with a lot of swoopy branches all over: C) there are no electrical, telco or any other kind of wire within fifty feet of said trees; D) we can drop them on the other side of my fence into a gravelled driveway belonging to the neighbors and their house is about 35 feet away; E) I have a gigantic 50’ maple with very stout limbs from which to guy the cypresses so that I can put a back pull with a block and tackle on the felled tree as two other guys lead it down from the front; and F) the wood is going to a friend of mine who has a bigass wood stove in his shop so all we have to do is get it into logs and rounds and schlep it up to his place. Then I only have to worry about taking the little stuff to the local mulch grinder.

That being said, I’m still trepiditious about this particular endeavor, and it is only my grave dislike of spending yet another Oregon winter in the pernicious shade of these gloomy specimens of flora that is overcoming my natural tendency to procrastinate… :wink:

I suspect that once we get going my natural cowgirl tendencies will take over and I will enjoy the wanton destructiveness of it all immensely!

I learned about cutting down trees a long time ago, by watching my dad and grandfather across from my house. It went like this here…

  1. Call a bunch of guys.
  2. Send one guy up the tree with small chainsaw.
  3. Everyone else finishes a 6 pack while tree-top guy cuts the limbs away.
  4. Tree-top guy comes down, everybody else picks up the limbs while he starts another 6 pack.
  5. Next guy goes up the tree, hacks off parts of the trunk at an angle that slide off either side of yon twee.
  6. Everybody else finishes a 6 pack while trunk guy cuts as far down as he can, almost to the stump.
  7. Trunk guy finishes that and starts another 6 pack, while every body else cuts the big pieces up into manageable ones.
  8. One guy cuts a giant divot in the stump.
  9. Another guy pours chainsaw fuel into the stump and sets it on fire.
  10. Way more six packs.
  11. About midnight, truck guy comes, chains the stump, yanks it out, and drives home the half mile dragging a now flaming tree stump.
    Good times.

Chain saws and beer. Why not add firearms next time just to make sure?

I’ve been doing a lot of chainsawing around the house this passt summer. Haven’t dropped anything bigger than a cedar tree with an 8-inch trunk. But I had to take the saw into the shop on the very first day I tried using it. I felt like an idiot that I couldn’t get it started (a brand new Stihl 16" bar, fresh out of the box from Christmas), until the guys at the shop had to take it apart and replace the fuel mix valve.

We usually do. Helps control the squirrel population when they scamper out of the branches.

Heh heh heh heh heh…

So the question now becomes: Is it better to get advice from random (albeit highly intelligent, attractive, and witty) anonymous posters on the SDMB or from a search using Google?

You decide!

Use both and make an informed decision. Works for me.

Jim

Scylla, I made this mistake more than once. Then I remembered some of the engineering statics from college, and realized this: The wedge cutout is just to provide a place for the trunk to go when the tree starts leaning. If the center of mass (look at the lean of the tree and consider the weight and location of its limbs) is on the other side of the tree, no amount of wedge is going to make it fall into the wedge. The only exception to this rule is the use of a long cable or chain and a substantial pulling machine. Personally, I use a 9,000 lb. John Deere tractor for this. However, I still have nightmares about a tree too large that turns into a trebouchet and slings my tractor through the air like a big green pumpkin. Also, the cable had better be longer than the tree is tall. Hopefully, the reason for this is obvious.

I won’t go into the details of hinge points, or the possibilities of twisting, or the precautions you can take to avoid splitting the trunk when the wood is valuable. I’m avoiding these subject because these are things about which I know just enought to be dangerous.

The people I’ve known that do this for a living usually carry at least two saws all of the time. My amateur solution to this has been to carry an extra bar and chain. When one gets stuck, I can detach the saw motor and attach the second bar and saw out the other.

I had this happen one morning, and when the tree fell, the stuck bar and chain that had been stuck fell into an adjacent slough. I had to wade in to get it. When the water spilled over the top of my boots, it took my breath away. Then I remembered seeing a skim of ice on the water when I had started out that morning. Fortunately, I had an extra pair of socks in the truck.

See, is SDMB not better than Google for the collection of usefull information.