About this time last year I decided that one of the dead pines on the other side of my driveway was getting too dangerous, dropped a couple of branches through my front deck roof (Murphy's law, never through an edge panel that's easy to replace) during a couple of particularly stormy nights the winter before. About 50-60ft high and about 18"diam., located between main power lines to another house, my house, several large firs and cedars and a fence running in the direction of the planned fall. The landing zone across the driveway has two large cedars on the house side, a 15' gap then a largish fir, the gap giving me about 10degrees to aim for, hm shouldn't be a problem me thinks, pretty basic. Pre-roped the victim and ran the rope around the trunk of the fir and down the driveway a safe distance so that (in theory) I could keep it from debranching the cedar as it fell. My friend and me tied the end of the rope to his Cutlass and put very slight pressure on the rope, maybe a hundred pounds max. Did my face, checked directions again, everything going fine, did the backcut, it started to go over just exactly right...... then, what tension there was, pulled it ever-so-slightly and into the fir it went where it hung on a 2" branch 30ft up.........GAH!! :help: just kill me now Kk, so I throw a thick line over it, retrieve it with a long pole and tie both ends to buddy's trailer hitch and tried to pull it away from fir tree, down the road.......to no avail. By now my several visitors are getting amused and the laughter is starting to sting a bit. We pull harder, digging two trenches down the (wet sandy) driveway and spinning 50,000km worth of rubber off his new tires (well her tires, gf's car) and, snapped the rope. Finally, by now quite embarrassed, we reset some new lines and ran car on the other side of the cedar (my poor lawn) and basically pulled down and forward on it, and it finally came down with a hefty nudge onto its intended mark where I quickly dealt with it while bud filled in the ruts. To add insult to injury what had killed the tree in the first place, page wire fencing, made short work of my sharpening job when I was in the backcut and couldn't stop, :bang: It worked out fine in the end and no hampsters or bunnies were harmed in this endeavor but it was 30 minutes of my life I'd rather forget thanks. There is a lot to be said about keeping one's cool in such situations.
Notes to self, 'Pay attention stupid!' & 'Buy a 100' length of 1/2" cable.'
In retrospect I could have easily used a spanish windlass in the first place to pull it off instead of wasting gas lol. Oh well.
