I love the new avatars, very illuminating.
Today we split up, Preston and I went and did a pretty decent pruning job for a guy who used to be the head of the Ski Patrol at Mammoth and Dan drew the short straw and got to go grind stumps. Our day was good although very cold, mid 30's of which I am not accustomed to yet but will feel warm later. Dan's day was bad. Since my stump grinder is down he took a rental unit and ground out a large silver maple stump. It took him longer than he thought it would. Then he went to the smaller silver maple stump where my grinder went kaputz earlier in the week and the rental grinders' hydraulics froze up in the customers backyard. The rental company came out with a replacement grinder and used it to tow the first grinder out of the backyard. After they left Dan started on the stump again only to find that the replacement grinder had no torque and bogged out every time the teeth were engaged. He said it was so weak that he had to push the thing into its trailer by manual force. Dan is a strong young man. He had a bad day and is off to go camping this weekend.
My guys are burned out, Dan from a season of firefighting and Preston from a long hard summer of tree work. We need to go do something fun together other than tree work. If there were more snow here I'd take them skiing. I am planning to give them bonuses and maybe do a dinner or a breakfast before Xmas.
I tried something the other day that worked fairly well. It was something I had been thinking of doing for a while. We had a large silver maple to grind out and although I cut it about an inch above the dirt they are so mounded up there was a ton of wood to grind through. What I did was I took my 440 with a 24" bar and cut into the stump from the top edge of the stump at about a 30 degree angle towards the center of the stump. I went around the stump overlapping similar cuts. I watched my chips to make certain I was not going through the bottom. When Dan ground the stump the center popped out taking a sizable chunk of wood with it.