Root / stump reactions to felling

pantheraba

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Dave made this comment in another thread:

nice pics B, good explanation, i could have used that recently, on an uprooted leaning redwood

i learned you can not trip a conventional cut, and leap off the root wad in time....s.o.b. left as i jumped
left me hovering about 10 ft in the air, with a 372 in my hands, to come down about where i was originally
but now the wad was in the ground again

It got me to thinking...what are the things that can go wrong with the root/stump of a tree as it is felled?

I have read of and seen video of a root pull from when a heavy leaning tree is cut (cannot find the video yet).

Burnham gave a good description of cutting a head leaner recently...I think he used a bore cut and tripping the back cut from the outside to prevent the spar from pulling the roots out of the ground with the spar (right?).

When I read Dave's description (above) of what happened to him I wondered if the rootball was displaced and angled out of the ground...as the spar separated from the stump did the rootball/stump then drop back into the hole?

I have never cut a leaner while standing on an "out of the hole" stump. I assume that when the spar leaves the stump it can possibly be a pretty violent return back down in the hole (it sounds like that is what left Dave suspended in the air like a fairy:D)

How is the feller supposed to cope with that (not the fairy but the rootball falling out from under you)?
 
You may not under stand a thing he says, but it is good technique for cutting wind thrown.
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What was that strap he used to twist that broken blow over off the stump? Did he take his belt off?
 
I wanna look closer at that again.. it looked like a loop runner..
Hmmmmmmm

Great thread and subject BTW, Excellent video. This kind of situation is deadly and dangerous in the extreme. We rarely get them here, but we do from time to time. Black oaks fair the worst and you are usually dealing with a lot of girth.
Glad you are ok Dave. That could have ended badly.

Edit.. Strap of some sort..
 
I got called in to look at a heavy leaning fir tree at Muir Woods National Monument. It was 5-6' at the butt, leaning at about 70 degrees, the rootflair was lifting and it was developing vertical cracks. One of their main walkways was underneath the tree and its very large horizontal branches were likely to take some smaller redwoods with it when it fell. They wanted to know if I could either climb it and cut the major limbs off or fell it safely. Haley had just been born and I turned it down. I could see so many bad things happening as it fell, the root wad lifting you and throwing you was one of them. The Park Service has a really good falling crew in Yosemite and those guys got called in for it. I went back couple years later and did some stump forensics to try to figure out what they had done. It was ugly looking and hard to tell the series of cuts other than the shallow face cut. I may still have a picture of it floating around.
 
I wonder what was up with that last cut, with the underbed on the side? It sure would be nice to know what he was saying. I've never seen anyone pack a saw like he did.
 
I'm not going to translate nine minutes of video, but that last cut is the modification of a Coos bay, that I have mentioned several times. There was a set of my clumsy drawings on the old Treehouse.

instead of cutting a regular Coos bay, you make it out like a triangle with the point facint in the direction of the fall. That way, when you cut it from the back, the wood holding the tree up will diminish rapidly, because it it triangular.

In the case of a super heavy headleaner, you make the tringle by setting two facecuts. That avoids the saw getting pinched.

This is not a directional fall, but a "save your butt and hopefully the log as well" kind of cut.

Does this make sense to you, or should I try to draw it again?


As for packing a saw, it was sure amusing to see a Swedish instructor packing a Stihl saw!
 
That was a good vid. Generally when I buck the root wads off though I don't leave a strap at the bottom. Other than that the rest is the same. typical bottom bind buck.
 
With the root wad bottom bind, I assume he is leaving the strap on the bottom so he can back chain almost all the way up through the log without it closing, then trip it from the top, as he did. It seems easier to kerf up a ways from the bottom until it starts to close, and trip it by cutting down through the top. No need for a bore cut. Perhaps he is thinking that he doesn't want his saw so deep in the log when it breaks free?
 
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