Felling a tree for the first time

[davidseaquist]

I had a dying pine tree in my yard, it was 60' tall and forked half way up twisted and leaning toward my home. I asked a neighbor for advice and read up on the Internet, about .com:forestry and a fiew other sites. I learned that you can push a small tree over by hand use wedges to turn a tree, or pull a tree with a tractor, or come along etc. where you want it. I climbed up the tree on a ladder and tied a strap as high as I could reach hooked the straps to chain I hooked the chain about 90' long. I hooked it to my tractor and backed up and put some tension on the tree. My wife was concerned I would destroy the landscape or hit the house she told me she would be very upset if I destroyed anything. Than I put by three dogs in the kennel and made sure know one was around. I put a notch cut in the direction I wanted the tree to fall I went on the back side and did a straight cut leaving a 5" hinge. I pulled on the tree with my tractor trying to get it to fall 180 degrees form the direction of lean, it fell 90 degrees from the direction of lean in between a bunch of landscape we had planted, no damage to anything except to the ground cover. IT was a bit of luck and god than helped me on this one. I kept peace in the family. What methods do you use to fell a tree and have yuou ever been lucky or unlucky felling a tree. Sorry I did not take any pictures. David

 

[zeuspaul]

Thirty years ago I cut an eighteen inch maple for a neighbor. I tied some 1/2 nylon rope to the maple and a nearby tree. The theory was the rope would pull the tree away from the house as she fell.

She fell toward the house as I predicted....the rope snapped and sprung back wrapping itself around the legs of my friends wife..she fell over.

Luckily the tree wasn't as tall as I thought. The top branches just skimmed the house doing no damage.

Trees are VERY MASSIVE!!!

Last week one of my neighbors was topping a tree. He tied his UTV to a branch to pull it in the direction he wanted it to go. The branch ended up pulling and lifting the UTV onto two wheels!

Zeuspaul

 

[pat32rf]

1/2" nylon is pretty marginal for tree work. 3/4 is a lot better. If you are using poly rope 3/4 is minimum, especially if you are using them as safety ropes where you will want to change the direction of a moving tree. Its a LOT better and easier to get the tree going in the right direction first.
Cut your notch in the direction you want it to go- doesn't have to be that deep. Then apply tension and do your back-cut. Just make sure that the rope is long enough for your pull vehicle to get out from under the trees path, or rig a pulley so you are pulling from the side. Once it starts to fall you will have trouble keeping a tight rope. (On a tractor you won't be able to do it)
If the tree is leaning the wrong way to begin with you should get a pro to help.
I stood back and watched a young friend cut a poplar a coupla weeks back. Sucker was over 80' tall and almost 24" at the butt. Twice the size of anything he had ever cut but he had done a lot of reading on how to do it. He used a plastic wedge and had the tree fall exactly where it should. We were clearing his building lot and wanted to use the tree to support the side of his driveway so if he had been 20 degrees off it wouldn't have mattered, just been harder to pull into place but he gained a lot of confidence in that one perfect cut.....

 

[George2615]

My neighbor helped me fell a dead 60' pine that was also leaning toward my house. We used a portable winch that strapped around another tree away from the house. I wrapped a chain around the dead pine about 25' up (as far as I could reach off a ladder). Hooked the chain to the rope winch and as we cut we kept applying tension with the winch. It fell right toward where the winch was pulling from. He said he got the winch from a tree service friend of his and that was how they did it. I'm sure any winch would do as long as your are past the point where the tree will fall so it doesn't come down on top of the winch operator.

 

[john_bud]

Farming and forestry are two of the deadliest occupations.

 

[LBrown59]

U can only fall it one time.

 

[tallyho8]

And,
U can only fail it one time.

 

[Defective]

I dropped my first tree in 1976.

I've been at it fairly regular ever since.

I will NOT give advice about felling an awkward tree. I will occasionally offer to do the job myself. At times I will strongly recommend calling in a tree service with equipment to take it down from the top.

One thing I will NEVER do is try to PULL a tree over. It either goes where I aim it with careful cutting and wedges, or it goes where it wants & I clean up the mess.

OK...done ranting now...

 

[sandman2234]

Putting tension on a rope with a vehicle, and then parking the vehicle can be dangerous, to say the least. Make sure the vehicle is capable of moving faster than the tree will fall, and can keep the rope tight till the time it hits the ground. Never fall a large tree or arkward tree without help, and somebody to call for help should something go wrong.
David from jax

 

[Defective]

OK...maybe not quite done ranting...

Exercise for the student: What does a tree weigh? What does your vehicle weigh?

Hint: I have personally seen an F150 fly. (No...it was not my truck & I did not help chain it to the tree...)

Second exercise: What is the load rating of your rope?

Heck with it...I'll answer this one. 3/4" nylon rope has a safe working load around 1400 pounds. Think back to the hint two paragraphs up. The truck weighed between 5 & 6 thousand pounds.

Third exercise: How tall is the tree? Do you know how to measure it?

One of the primary safety rules in felling trees is quite simple. Allow no-one to remain in range of the falling tree. Clear the area before you start cutting.

 

[davidseaquist]

MY tractor weighs 10,000 lbs I was 30 feet further that the tree would reach if it fell towards me. IF the tree fell naturally towards its natural direction would have crushed all of our landscaping or fell towards the home. I used some 3/8th chain and 1/4' chain rated for 3,500/10,000 lbs and some straps rated for 2 1/2 tons My tractor has rops/fops [ a cap ] and the 72" loader was towards the tree. I was willing to let it damage the landscaping I was just trying to prevent it. David

 

[D7E]

Being a logger and a tree surgeon i should not encourage this but it's just common sense , Anyone can drop a tree , Look at the lean , Which side has the heavyest canopy and what can it hit . If you are able to take branches off the heavy side that helps ,Using a tractor to pull is fine if you rope is long enough ,Or even pushing with a loader (depending on height)
Doing it manually with wedges works if you know how to make your sink and leave a hinge and generally know how to cut , If you're not a clued up chainsaw user leave it alone " A blunt saw is the worst killer "

 

[ragkar]

A couple years ago I felled two seventy foot dead oaks on my property. Now I always wanted to stand back, yell 'timber' and watch a magnificent giant fall to the ground. Well it didn't work out that way.
You're wearing ear protection because of the chainsaw noise and it takes several seconds to realize that she's falling. There's only time enough to switch off the saw, put it down and run away on one of the 45 degree escape routes that you had planned out for yourself.
All the while you're praying that it's falling as predicted. Oak weighs 46 pounds per cubic foot and I figure that those trees weighed about three to five tons.
Well both trees fell as planned but I'm glad that I don't have to do that again. I expect that if I had the trees chained to my nearly a ton pickup and the tree fell the wrong way, it would have yanked the pickup who knows where.

 

[VABlue]

My lot has too many scrub pines to fell on my own. Some of them, the worst of them, lean towards the house or fence. Those are the ones I want down today, but don't have the experience to safely cut and have them fall where I want them to. Which means that I'll have to bring out a tree service to do it right. Too much money right now... The others I'll do myself because I don't care where they come down. Most of those will get caught up in other trees on the way down, anyway...

 

[ding2520]

Another way to stay safe.....

 

[EddieWalker]

A few years ago I was cutting down some small to medium sized trees at a house I owned. I was on the last tree, and had done about ten of them without any problems. This last one was gonna be the easiest due to it's natural lean and 12 inche diameter. Nothing to it. I notched it away from the house and as I cut it, it started to lean where it was supposed to go. I steped back to let it fall nice and easy, and it tricked me. As it started falling, it twisted on me and went from leaning one way, to the exact oposite. I never saw this before, nor even expected it.

The tree was now falling on top of the house. It was all in slow motion and I just stood there and watched. Somehow, it cought a branch of a tree I saved and came to rest about four feet above the house. It really was a matter of inches that saved me!!!!

Eddie

 

[turnkey4099]

I have been cutting firewood (6-10 cord/year) for 30 years currently and a couple back when I was a kid.

Defective is correct. Don't use rope is the best policy. If I have to pull or even just stabilize a tree, it is wire cable and chain. If you must use rope, do not use that old rope you have hanging in the shed. New, or near new only. They deteriorate just hanging there to say nothing of the damage/abuse they have had in the past.

Pulling a tree is a shaky proposition at best. The instant (and I do mean instant) a tree starts to move you loose tension in the cable and that tow rig had best be moving fast. Rely on the cable/chain to keep it from falling where you don't want but don't expect the tow to keep pulling it after the first few feet.

Last one I pulled I had my cable 20 ft up, tied off to a very firm deadman, hung four 5 gallon buckets of water in the middle hoping they would maintain the pull. It sorta worked, maintained pull for the first few feet but then gravity worked slower than the tree. At least it did not fall on the house.

With all my experience I won't try to fall a tree that has any chance of damaging anything important. That is expert time and that I am not. The above one, I knew could hit the house, I was trying to avoid damaging a fence - it didn't work.

Harry K

 

[GaryBDavis]

Source unknown

 

[schmism]

Source unknown

thats likely "caption this pic"

(in reality im cutting wood off my truck that was squashed after tornato rolled through... or hurican Katria hit or ......)