Dropping Standing Dead Stuff

[Denis Gionet]

Hello,

Long time lurker, first time poster. I did not know if i should put this in the dropping dead stuff thread or the Cottonwood ditch thread. I have 6 dead Cottonwoods to drop. Most of the tops are gone as well as the smaller branches. Cottonwood seems to drop branches if a star shines on them funny. 5 of them are still attached to the ground. I have one leaner that is caught up in an adjacent Cottonwood. Thought i might post a few pics for you.

Thank you for all of the help, experience and reading over the years. This is a great resource.

Regards,

rampaging-sloth


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Yeah, there's a couple of real ugly ones in there, that I wouldn't even look at without 150 feet of HD winch on a truck. Like Dominoes ready to squash you like a bug. If you tackle those standing corpses, don't become one yourself. Bring someone with experience, REAL experience, to help you on that job.

Her's an ugly Tamerack that collasped when we put the saw to it...Got away wth it...Lucky


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I give up, I tried to put pictures in post....no joy...

How much saw did you get into it ? It looks like you leaned the bar against the trunk and it blew up on you !

"He who fights, and runs away, lives to fight another day..."
Hahahahahahahaha!!! I'm just glad most of the junk I deal with, ain't that vertical!!!

I knew I had heard that expression before.... never thought of applying it to tree felling though !!!

 

[RandyMac]

I hear ya Ron.

Dead standing trees can be the bane of all, best to be avoided.
That said.....
Not all of them can be left to fall on their own for any number of reasons. Some are hazards to life and property, others should be utilized. Step back and scope the thing out, are there are obvious hanging limbs and crap. Is the top loose? An unsteady top can "fold" back on the way down. Conifers with thick bark have the habit of shrinking, leaving a bark tube around the stem. The bark will often collapse straight down like an avalanche or peel away in great slabs. Now wedging should be a careful venture, give the wedge a whack and look up, never set up a rhythm.
It is pretty tough to get a lot of practice on snags, most guys haven't got the time or the place to play with the nasties. I did, my brother and I roamed Humboldt looking for the worst ones we could find, there were many. We called it practice, in reality, it was Sport Falling, thrill seeking some would call it. There were more than a few times, we bit into something, that tried to kill us. The learning curve is steep, go slow, be observant.

 

[Hedgerow]

I hear ya Ron.

Dead standing trees can be the bane of all, best to be avoided.
That said.....
Not all of them can be left to fall on their own for any number of reasons. Some are hazards to life and property, others should be utilized. Step back and scope the thing out, are there are obvious hanging limbs and crap. Is the top loose? An unsteady top can "fold" back on the way down. Conifers with thick bark have the habit of shrinking, leaving a bark tube around the stem. The bark will often collapse straight down like an avalanche or peel away in great slabs. Now wedging should be a careful venture, give the wedge a whack and look up, never set up a rhythm.
It is pretty tough to get a lot of practice on snags, most guys haven't got the time or the place to play with the nasties. I did, my brother and I roamed Humboldt looking for the worst ones we could find, there were many. We called it practice, in reality, it was Sport Falling, thrill seeking some would call it. There were more than a few times, we bit into something, that tried to kill us. The learning curve is steep, go slow, be observant.

Were you guys bored? Or what??? Either way, glad you dinked with it and took mental notes...
Cause I hate dealing with dead trees!!! I'll post a pic tomorrow of one that was a miserable FAIL!!!

 

[WidowMaker]

Had cut about about 2 bars widths(see first picture) in on the gunning cut and had pulled out to look it
over cause could tell it was hoelow, when it gavs a big pop and I left the area in a hurry.
It came down about 90* from intended, so happens I chose the right direction to escape...
Took a few minutes to recoupe and start bucking...

 

[Steve NW WI]

Here's one of my videos from 3 years ago, and an example of what can go wrong with the dead stuff.

I was pushing a little dead elm over that was limb locked (upper branches tangled in with other trees). I couldn't wedge it out of there, didn't want to go get the rope, so I gave it a push with the loader. The end of the video shows the tree hung up again close to the ground. What it doesn't show was right after I shut the camera off, one of the limbs being held up snapped, and the live smaller tree it was tangled in catapulted a 10' long 4" dia branch back at me, landing behind the tractor. Moral of the story: Till they're in the ash pan, they're not done trying to kill ya. Needless to say, I don't use this technique anymore, and HIGHLY recommend no one else does either.

Advice is given that assumes a higher level of reader competency than exists across the board. Example: Pulling trees - requires a skill set, tools, knowledge and experience many don't have.

Guilty, although I try to explain what I'm doing and why as best I can, I (and we as a group) need to realize that not only are our fellow AS nuts seeing this, but also Joe Homeowner that just signed up, as well as the general public. It's amazing how many times I google something related to saws or firewood and the first link is to an AS thread. Just look at the bottom of any thread and note how many guests are reading it.

<iframe width="640" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vYDptUSaSoo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[Winn R]

Thanks to all contributing to this thread. :msp_smile:

We dropped yesterday morning a 150 year old red oak that was 30 feet from the house and had a wrong lean. It died in the drought this summer.

And went right where we wanted.

 

[imagineero]

I have to do standing dead pretty often, and it's always residential. Sometimes we get lucky and there's room to drop, sometimes you can get a cherry picker in. In some cases there's no access and no room to work, home owner has to decide what to smash.

Assuming you've got plenty of room to work and can drop it in any direction then favoring the lean is great. If you have to take it against the lean then be sure and take it directly opposite to the lean. Take the time to assess the weight and ballance of limbs as well as the trunk. You can pretty successfully pull over dead stuff so long as you're directly opposite the lean. If you're off to the side the hinge side snaps sometimes.

I try not to wedge them at all. It shocks the tree and can break the hinge on smaller stuff. Since there isn't much flex in a lot of dead trees you end up with a very narrow hinge more often than not, unless it's rotten which is a whole other thing.

My preferred method is pulling over if it's not going with the lean. You want good strong bull rope and some means of tensioning it. A come along is great, as is any other sort of mechanical advantage. Winches need to be handled very carefully, and using a vehicle would be the last option for me. What I usually do is set the rope and hook it up to my mechanical advantage then stand off to the side while someone slowly tensions it. It's important to stand to the side or you wont clearly see movement in the top. Depending on the tree I'll usually tension it until the top moves anywhere between an inch and 5 inches. Then they've got the weight.

I make my gunning cut fairly deep on a pullover, about 40%. I do 2 face cuts, one from above at 45 degrees, and a second below to give me a 90 degree face. I want to keep it on the stump as long as possible. Put your best face on it, take the time and do what you need to do. Don't be afraid to mark it out, you only get one go at this. Clean out the face with a twig, make sure you've got a perfect crisp hinge. Re-cut it and make it right, there's plenty of time. Hurrying and being full of adrenaline is the cause of a lot of accidents.... People push ahead for no reason when they know they haven't quite got it right.

I make my back cut level. I start the back cut and keep an eye on it as I progess. If the kerf opens at all, they've got too much tension on the rope and I ease it off. If it closes even a little I have then inch the tension on. Control is everything on the rope, I want someone there who has a cool head and a steady hand. I keep progressing the back cut until I've got maybe 5% or less hinge depending on the tree. It's not unusual to need to come back and take a little more out of it. I pop a wedge in, but hand set it. I dont knock it.

I step away off to the side and have the rope guy inch the tension on. Hand operated devices have the advantage here because they give you more feel and they move slow. A big which or truck wont give you feedback on whether you've left too much hinge. When it's ready, it will come smooth and steady. If you're tensioning and the kerf isn't opening then you've left too much hinge; you're going to snap the tree. Take a little off and go back and open the hinge up a bit more. If the tree isn't too bad I'll stay there and give it a little tweak as they inch until we hit the sweet spot, then I move out.

Pulling over need not happen fast, and the bigger the tree the slower it goes. Big trees need time to move.

Shaun

 

[haveawoody]

I think it comes down to how dead or how dead and rotten a tree is.

Is it a softwood tree or hardwood or very hardwood.
Each is going to be a different challenge to remove.

Anything that is dead gets a few long looks before i think about removing it.
On a dead tree the branches can be much more of a hazard than the tree so removing things that can fall on you while you fell cut is a practice that is IMO is a must.

Keep your escape path clean and tidy, on long dead things i try to have two clean escape paths in different directions.

I like to rap the tree with a hammer, just a small carpenters hammer for me.
The noise that hammer makes sometimes decides if i will attempt that tree or head for heavy equipment to rip it out or leave it for nature to fell.

My 5d slight downcut IMO it just makes me feel more secure that i get a wedge in a bit faster and if the tree is quite rotten inside it's a bit of a stop from going backwards.
Gives you a couple more seconds if things go really wrong.

As for wedges on dead hardwoods i thing generally it's a good idea to get them in place ASAP.
Softwoods yes but just to stop a rock back, a couple of small wedges even on a rot beast will help stop any cracks from migrating and the tree from rocking in the wind.
With any dead tree just get the wedge's in place and don't to do much thumping on them.

IMO if you are looking at a tree for 15 minutes before you have a plan, the tree has vertical cracks or the tree has partial limbs then it's heavy equipment time or walk away and call in a professional crew time or just walk away.

Nothing wrong with being smart enough to know when to cut and when not to.
IMO dead softwoods are the most dangerous.

 

[Whitespider]

Standing-dead leaning over the power lines...

The rigging...

The cut and pull...

 

[ri chevy]

Cool. Nice job there with both cutting, pulling and photographing! :msp_thumbup:

 

[Hedgerow]

This one got done, but was a FAIL, as far as doing what I wanted it to do... It took an hour, and was a learning experience... Had a rotten top with large limbs hanging to one side... Stick was leaning the other... Had to drop one way, cause I refused to work under all the large dead limbs. Fortunately, the trunk had enough good left in it to not have what Randy refers to as a "noisy event"... This tree was the one that persuaded me to get a saw that would run a 36" bar... The 24" bar reaching from both directions still would not catch the center fibers. If faced with this again, it would be a "walk away" tree, or a "get the neighbor's track loader" tree...

 

[RandyMac]

Walking away was something I had to work at, it was hard to pass up an opportunity.
No we were not bored, this was one of the things we did for fun. My brother and I would grab a case of PBR, a couple heavy revolvers, load up big saws in a rusty, beater pick-up and head for Southern Humboldt. We spent the day hunting down big Doug Fir snags and hardwoods like Madrones or Tanbark Oaks. In that part of the county, big uglies were plentiful, the old style logging and fires left monuments everywhere. We justified some of this as lighting rod removal, some were firewood, most were left to continue rotting.

 

[802climber]

Standing-dead leaning over the power lines...

Not trying to be a jerk, but those look like a pretty major set of power lines...you might want to be more careful...using chain and metal cable to pull with...don't want to think about if anything had went wrong there. Would have been some fireworks and a highly conductive link, to you.

 

[Larry Ashcraft]

Tons of good information in this thread. Thanks, guys...

I've dropped a few dead cottonwoods on our river bottom. So far, all of them have fallen right where I aimed them. My first step is to park the truck, dogs, wife and kids way out of harm's way, then I notch and backcut to take advantage of the tree's natural lean. I always clear several escape routes, and when I hear the first crack, I run like hell. Most of the time, I just drop the saw so it doesn't slow me down.

The drought in 2002 killed at least 50 large cottonwoods on our place, so the wind has been doing my job for me the last few years. We've got enough deadfall to keep us in firewood for several more years. It takes at least five years for wood to rot on the ground here, since it's so dry (17" of rain per year is our average).

 

[H 2 H]

Here is one of the Alders I dropped last night

It made a little noise when coming down and rotated about 60 degrees on the stump but landed in the area I wanted it to

 

[WidowMaker]

This one got done, but was a FAIL,

=====

No fail as long as it's on the ground and no-one or thing got hurt....:msp_thumbup:

 

[rwoods]

I hear ya Ron.

Dead standing trees can be the bane of all, best to be avoided.
That said.....
Not all of them can be left to fall on their own for any number of reasons. Some are hazards to life and property, others should be utilized. Step back and scope the thing out, are there are obvious hanging limbs and crap. Is the top loose? An unsteady top can "fold" back on the way down. Conifers with thick bark have the habit of shrinking, leaving a bark tube around the stem. The bark will often collapse straight down like an avalanche or peel away in great slabs. Now wedging should be a careful venture, give the wedge a whack and look up, never set up a rhythm.
It is pretty tough to get a lot of practice on snags, most guys haven't got the time or the place to play with the nasties. I did, my brother and I roamed Humboldt looking for the worst ones we could find, there were many. We called it practice, in reality, it was Sport Falling, thrill seeking some would call it. There were more than a few times, we bit into something, that tried to kill us. The learning curve is steep, go slow, be observant.

I'm with you, Randy. Thank you for continuing to share your knowledge and experience with us. I guess if I were to clarify anything in my post it would be: The post was directed towards non-pros as myself; that there are many more trees to be walked away from by folks like me than by an experienced logger, fire crew member, line clearer or arborist; and that I didn't mean to imply that a hazard tree should be simply left because as you stated some must be felled. When I lived in a heavily wooded area, I routinely removed by myself every tree hazard (no matter how dangerous the removal was) as I had three little girls running around - I didn't really think at the time about the price they would have paid if I had seriously injured or killed myself in the process. But now, if a tree (or the overhead situation) is seriously questionable but nevertheless needs to come down, I hire a real pro with the tools and the crew to put it on the ground. The first time was pretty tough and cost me the price of a nice 125 but I got over it.

Ron

PS I never considered it sports falling but in my independent youth almost all I cut were standing deads and all for entertainment sake - probably not 1/10 of 1% of your sport falling and certainly toothpick size in comparison and danger.

 

[rwoods]

5 degree back cut

haveawoody, I'm not trying to give you a hard time but are you sure that your 5 degree back cut is not a lot more than 5 degrees? If you take a 12" deep level back cut and instead cut a 5 degree sloping cut, it will start at a point 1.05" higher than a level cut but will only be .046" longer than a level cut. To lenghten the sloping cut to just 1/4" longer than a level cut, you would have to begin your back cut 2.462" higher and cut at an 11.594 degree angle. A 1/2" longer sloping cut would be 3.5" higher and at a 16.26 degree angle. Here's a link to a triangle calculator if you want to do some calculations. Online Triangle Calculator--Calculates angles and sides of right triangle, draws image of your triangle Ron

 

[flyboy553]

90% of what I cut is standing dead red oak. Very interesting to see what some of you go through to cut standing dead wood.

But I think the one thing that stands out the most to me is that you take so very much care with standing dead. I take the same precautions with standing dead as I do with live trees. It seems to me that if you are taking extra caution with a dead tree, in reality, you are not taking enough cautions with a live one.

Branches come off of live ones, live ones can be hollow, all the same issues can be found with live ones as well as a dead one. In fact, have one standing in my yard. Some live ones need to be walked away from, too.

Just saying, use exactly the same care with live as you do dead ones and you will be fine.

Ted

 

[rwoods]

Ted, you're right. I tend to walk around and around a standing dead and think the cut through - some are sized up immediately and others I meditate on for days - but I am way too casual at times with live trees, you would think I was on production. Thanks for the reminder. Ron