Back again homies.
Well when it doesn't rain it pours. All of a sudden I've had more tree work than I know what to do with and actually had to palm one job off as it would have meant taking a week off from my day job in the busiest time of our year.
I had a call from one of the property managers at the last minute requesting that I partially cut down 10,000 Tangelo trees as they want to graft them to a new Mandarin variety. Unfortunately the guy who does the grafting is in town and caught them on the hop. One of the pruning contractors gave him a quote that was through the roof so he asked that I do the job at their rates as he knows my saws will be way quicker. Unfortunately one of the guys at my work has been diagosed with prostate cancer and is off for treatment on Monday so I had to decline as we are already understaffed. I would have made about $3000-3500 in 6 days. Bummer...
Anyway, I was back out at the neighbouring property to the one above and got stuck into the last remaining row of the larger Casuarinas here - I dropped maybe 120 in 6 1/2 hours and there are still a fair few to go but many of these will have to have their tops trimmed with a high lift truck before I can fell them. They have massive leans and there is no way you'll get them to go where you want unless the tops are knocked out of them. I had a pretty strong Westerly/South Westerly wind which was ideal and it helped immensely in getting these trees over the way they had to go.
I decided to fit out a new 24" Tsumura with a .325" nose and tried a loop of Carlton K3C semi chisel with a Stihl 9 pin rim. I ran it on the pop upped 7900 and it cut really well. Unfortunately .325" in this particular situation was getting blunt far too quick so although it was a good thing to try I'll go back to 3/8" in future once this loop is worn out.
I also ended up running a 32" 3/8" bar on both the 7900 and 390XP for the rest of the felling. The larger trees in the video were super hard and as hard as any of the Casuarinas I've cut. There is a video coming of the 390XP with a 32" buried and it is really working hard. Way harder than it normally would and this was with non skip semi chisel and a 7 pin rim.
Apart from maybe getting my mitts on a new Husky 550XP I'm really happy with my current saw lineup and really don't want to change anything.
I have basically all bases covered now with 2 x Stihl 200T's, a Stihl HT131 Pole Saw, the little Stihl MS241C, a Husky 353, 2 x ported Dolmar 7900's, a ported 390XP, and the muffler modded 3120.
I'm getting the 390XP video done up as we speak and I was hoping to have these uploaded earlier in the week. Unfortunately something went astray with my video editing program (Cyberlink Powerdirector 9) so had to upgrade to the latest Version 11 which solved the problem (for $150 dammit
). I still use basic old Windows Movie Maker for the titles but that program is crap with HD videos in my book.
Anyway here are some piccys. Tracy came out on the camera while Zoe was asleep under some Avocado trees in her pram. I was hoping to get more videos but unfortunately babies need to be fed and have nappies changed. Who would have thunk it
390XP with 24" Chinabar...
As I've mentioned before you always have to be careful with these things where they have bifurcated trunks. I've been lucky (and also very careful and cautious) but this tree split on the way over. If I'd have cut much higher I may have had the back half of the tree crack off and come over, potentially on me...
And the video...
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