Helluva job Brandon.
And that looks like an Sawinred Andy backcut!!!! :hmm3grin2orange:
(Sorry, I couldn't resist....
)
I knew someone was going to say something about that...I actually thought about putting in a disclaimer with my pics, but thought that would seem silly. Anyway, the backcut was actually good when the tree went down. But I hit a really wacky ant nest in a pocket in the center of the tree, so I cut a couple slices off until I had solid wood again to stand on to work on cutting up the rest of it, hence the angled cut. I tried leaving it alone but it was squishy and the ants kept climbing all over me. Ants in my pants = not cool at all.
Really nice - that willow was a good bit larger than they get here.......
Fair firewood also, unlike alder, but not as good as birch, etc etc.......
In theory it is mediore-to-OK firewood, but at least around here by the time most of them need to be cut down they're half rotten already. This particular tree was actually pretty sound, better than I had expected except for a large vein of rot on the back side (fence side) that resulted from the line clearance crew doing a number on it years ago. And there were a number of massive insect nests in the trunk, too - the ants at the base, two large nests of pillbugs, and a second, even larger nest of ants at the original site of the line clearance crew's work, about 12' up.
I have to get a couple pics of a truly big willow in a park in Ann Arbor. It is a multi-trunk tree on a floodplain, that split apart yet continues to live, sort of. People have stacked logs to make stairs so you can walk into the center of the trunk where the tree split apart, and someone hid a geocache up in there. It must have been 8'+DBH, and probably 12'+ at the point where the multiple stems diverged from the main trunk. The branches themselves, which are now horizontal but continue to grow new vertical shoots, are 3'+ in diameter. It is one prehistoric-looking, scary tree.
Nice way to pay for a saw. I did not know you did tree service work.
This stuff is purely recreational and voluntary. It's a historic, private 10 acre cemetery on the Redford/Detroit boarder that I've got many generations of kinfolks buried in, along with a number of veteran burials dating back to the revolutionary war. Since I'm the only person on the board of directors of the cemetery association under the age of 40 and there are only 2 of us under the age of 65, well, I do much of the upkeep. Luckily a number of friends are willing to come out and lend a hand on a fairly regular basis, so we've been able to make some progress on cleaning it up over the past three or four years.
I used to do a bit of for-pay tree work back when I was in undergrad and law school, as an evenings and weekends and days w/o classes sort of thing. Mostly smaller residential removals and storm damage cleanup. But between work and going back to school (yet again, this time for an MBA), I don't have time to do much paying tree work right now.
