Good Lord! Some of you guys just blow my mind away.
Maybe you should try to remember that you were not there.
So, Guido Salvage, if “a three-year-old should not be anywhere near an active falling zone”… just what exactly is “an active falling zone”? How large is it? How far away do you have to stand to be out of the “active falling zone”? What is considered “near an active falling zone”? Does this mean a three-year-old should never be “near” any sort of danger zone? Like for example a road… how far back from the road does that three-year-old have to be before he is no longer considered “near it? It’s ridiculous to put a set quantity on anything like what you say… each situation requires individual evaluation by the supervising adult, not by some after-the-fact arm-chair referee.
And you logbutcher… You said three “close calls”, but you still only list one (this one). Your other four examples are from one post in which everything went exactly as planned, no “close calls” of any sort! And even those examples are nothing out-of –the-ordinary… What? Trucks, chains, cables and pulleys shouldn’t be used for pulling? And there was absolutely nothing obviously diseased or rotten about that tree! In fact, go back and look at the pictures again and you’ll see where I “ringed” it intentionally to kill it about a year ago… so it would drop most of its weight before I took it down. And I never said I watched “until the wedges fall out of the cut”… what I said was “when the wedges fall out I hit the throttle”.
And, as far as your comments Del_Corbin… show me where in that thread I ever used “snatching and shock loading of the tree”. I even said I slowly alternated between tensioning the cable and back-cutting. Only after the tree begins moving in the intended direction (when the wedges fall out) did I say I used the full throttle… and then the full throttle is used to minimize the amount of time for the tree to do something unintended. Yeah, I suppose my rigging could have failed (highly unlikely, but I've learned to never say never)… but then again the brakes on your truck could fail the next time you’re driving down a hill with a load on… So, you gonna’ quit driving your truck? If we stop doing everything that has a “could” or “maybe” attached to it… well, I ain’t gonna’ live in a glass house either, and if you do you shouldn’t be throwing stones.
I don’t mind constructive or helpful criticism, but some of you guys seem to read what you want to read, rather than what is actually written. Then you want to analyze, criticize, point fingers, attack my parenting skills (this ain't the first time for that and I’m in my mid-50’s and have raised other children, successfully) and then pump-up your own lacking self-esteem with some sort of hind-sight, arm-chair coaching of an event you never even attended… go screw yourselves.