bad situation

sorry about my bad paint skillz. hopefully you can get the point i am trying to make. these are hickory and t.i.p. is water oak. i turned this tree down today after climbing a bit to get a better look. the only available t.i.p is illustrated, which is already uncomfortably far away. dbh on split tree we are supposed to remove is ~3'. dbh on tree its laying in is ~1'. dbh of t.i.p tree is ~1.5'. i climbed to t.i.p and realized that i'd have to take #2 before i take #1. my line would be over #1, at about 45 degree angle. there's nothing to rope to except t.i.p, which is far too flimsy. the split is much worse than i make it out to be in the pic and is bent and partly broken already. the limb the tree is hanging on is about 4" diameter and the point where it is supporting the tree we are removing is out about 2 feet from the crotch. i am unsure how much weight the limb is supporting the tree and how much it is standing on its own. to me, its a crane job, but there's too many trees in the way to get the crane close enough. company owner called a friend of mine who has a bucket truck and they are over there doing it right now supposedly. even once the brush is gone, if the trunk doesnt lift out of the crotch, what are you going to do then? if i could have taken #1 first, leaving me a clear way to limbwalk out to #2, i would have done that and gone from there. any ideas?

Looks like a crane job to me; brush it out with the bucket, then crane the rest out. I've seen one done where the crane was pretty much just a rigging point, due to lack of room for the boom to move. Scaffolding would be the only other option I could see, cut and chuck in small pieces.

i just got word from the guy. when he pieced the brush out with the bucket, the wood stood up out of the crotch. he used my t.i.p to rope some of it to, which i would have been unwilling to do since it would have involved clipping my flipline to the split tree. once the tree stood up out of the crotch it was a no-brainer ofc. i regret the loss of money, but i still stand by my decision

Sometimes you got to walk away, and live to cut another day!!
Don't feel bad, done it myself.

asthesun said:

he used my t.i.p to rope some of it to, which i would have been unwilling to do since it would have involved clipping my flipline to the split tree.

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Would a wrapped friction saver as TIP, or a rigging block on the stem have worked?

Bermie said:

Sometimes you got to walk away, and live to cut another day!!
Don't feel bad, done it myself.

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thx, makes me feel better. only the second tree ever in 9 yrs. the first was a dead water oak leaning over the house. nothing at all around. guy had waaaaay underbid it and couldnt afford a crane. this thing was really crispy, surprising it was standing at all. i would have had to rope every limb to the tree, and buttcatch a top over the house, splattering dead limbs everywhere, then buttcatch wood back till it wasnt over the house anymore

John Paul Sanborn said:

Would a wrapped friction saver as TIP, or a rigging block on the stem have worked?

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friction saver is always nice, not sure what you mean regarding the rigging block

Usually I will bid those astronomically high and hope and pray they don't call. Those are the ones who usually do call though and I can't turn down the money. Looks like you could have set a block on the spar of the tree where your TIP was and worked it off of that. Hard to tell without seeing it though. If you had a bad feeling on that one then you did the right thing. Money isn't everything. Live to climb another day.

tree md said:

Usually I will bid those astronomically high and hope and pray they don't call. Those are the ones who usually do call though and I can't turn down the money. Looks like you could have set a block on the spar of the tree where your TIP was and worked it off of that. Hard to tell without seeing it though. If you had a bad feeling on that one then you did the right thing. Money isn't everything. Live to climb another day.

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roping to the t.i.p. was an option, but it would have shaken be up alot since that tree was very slender where i was tied in. i would have felt safer if i had tied into the tree we were removing, but less safe at the same time since if it fell while i was attatched to it and the t.i.p. i could have been ripped in half. there was no way to get a crane to it, but somehow the guy who did it god his bucket to it and roped alot to my t.i.p.. another thing that unnerved me was that there were numerous other trees in the area under me so i couldnt see the ground at all. every time i wanted to bomb something i had to yell 'headache' several times and make sure noone was under me. guy only put $700 on it. he has no insurance of any kind and i wasnt in the mood to wreck someone's house and then try to sneak away. this was a crane job all day. if i had bid on it, i would have bid very high and let the customer know that part of that cost would cover cutting down anything that was in the way of getting a crane to it, and the cost of the crane. was prolly a $2k job imo. prices are different everywhere tho

At $700 I wouldn't have walked away from that job... I would have ran!

tree md said:

At $700 I wouldn't have walked away from that job... I would have ran!

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we were only hauling the brush though, the wood was staying. even considering that, i would have put an easy 2k on it and 2.5k if he wanted it hauled.