Looking at your picture of the stump, guys with picks and shovels and cut roots from a recip saw. I wanted to share some ideas with you. I'll add some pictures in a clickable thumbnail so those that do not use a Bobcat or do not have interest do not need to see them.
This is what I used to do but the work has dried up with the building slump and my equipment pretty much sits and rusts.
I cleared lots for new homes and other clearing and grading jobs like kids play areas and such. Almost all the time I was a one man operation and didn't have to ever lift much more than a 20' section of 5/8 chain. (static single braid I think).
So, with the backhoe attachment I would fell trees by digging up the root system and basically pushing them over. Very effective and the trees generally went over slowly and would pop the rest of the stump out of the ground with it. I took many stumps out without the tree as well, many times after a customer already paid to have the stump ground but as soon as the grade was changed a couple of inches it would be exposed again. If the tree was in danger of going the wrong way, I would raise the bucket on my Bobcat, climb up and wrap the chain around it and secure it so that it could not fall the wrong direction. Then just dig around the roots until down it went. There was a technique for getting it to go just right but sitting in the Bobcat it was easy just to work my way around digging and pushing.
Once I had the tree down, I would support it with the same backhoe attachment, de-limb it and cut the logs into the length required by the wood yard, put them in my trailer and sell them. The limbs, stumps and debris would be cleared with the grapple bucket, put in my dump trailer and either dumped on property to decompose or I would take it to a mulch composting facility and they would use tub grinders to turn it into colored mulch for landscaping. Then it was just a matter of filling in the holes and smoothing things over.
It made the work pretty easy and not too costly because I'm working alone.
As you can see from the pictures, I had to beef up the wrist pin and knuckle joints because I'm using this beyond it's real intended purpose. I also made the thumb attachment myself from some 1/2 plate steel. Shut up, I know I'm not a great welder, but it works.
Anyway, this is great Bobcat attachment and not a lot of cost, thought you my be interested. This is not like the Bobcat backhoe attachment that is very expensive and requires you to get out of the cab, I sit in the cab under the protection of the cage the whole time, not that a tree coming down cant take you and the cage, but it really did make the job of stump and tree removal easy. For a complete tree removal this worked best for me, made it so easy to get the stump when it was still attached to the tree, plus the stump was not left to eventually decompose and leave a hole.
Looking at your pictures, I honestly could have gone there by myself and had that thing in my trailer in an hour.
Below thumbnails photos are clickable links to the larger image.
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