Removing Bark Before Felling?

lxskllr

Treehouser
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Jul 21, 2019
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Is this something that's routinely done? I'm wondering how anyone uses full chisel chain otherwise. Thinking back to my disaster oak, I used one of the couple full chisel chains I still have. I figured it was standing wood, and would be fairly clean. What I didn't account for was the dirt drive a few feet away, and had sparks coming out of the backcut :^S That pretty much negated any advantage to using the full chisel. Seems like any time gained by a faster cut would be counteracted by pre prep getting the wood decent to cut.
 
From accumulated knowledge, not experience, redwood bark is removed by many folks. It’s done mostly because it wants to pinch the bar, I believe- may be wrong. I occasionally see people cut the bark off or wack it with an axe. Personally, I’ve never done it except where it’s very dirty and I’m milling.
 
I don't have often a thick bark, and nothing near what you have on the giants. But I had a peek on it on different occasions.
Clear view on the real wood is a good one for precise cuts, especially with fluffy bark. Same for the trunk covered by a mess of ivy. Just to see what I'm doing.
Thick bark means less reach for the actual cutting. It reduces the lifting potential for the wedges too and can make the wedges hard to set in (spitting out the stacked wedges for exemple).
I remove the loose bark every time, even if thin, because the gap between the wood and the bark ends filled with crap by some of the many small critters near the ground. Ants are masters for that, earht worms too.
Alaping the stump is very common but most of the time I manage it by circling around the stump with only the pulling chain getting out of the bark (after boring in the cleanest area). Ivy is completly removed though, because there's dirt trapped between the ivy's sprouts and the bark. The need to remove the bark on the real dirty ones is rare enougth, like the trees in a pile of rubble or in the bare dird of a flower bed.
 
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Imagine a wind break tree line (salt cedar) with deep groove bark on the edge of a windy sandy desert…yeah… @SeanKroll knows what I’m talking about.

Seems if one is working off a truck, an extra little saw with semi chisel on it might be handy to have just to ring the tree in the cutting area and then knock it off with an axe.
 
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Sounds like a lot of extra work. What would happen if you used semichisel chain, and just cut it normally? Could it be completed without resharpening? I've never worked in wind blown sand conditions, but I've done some gnarly dirt caked sticks on the ground. I've leaned cutting straight through those is a losing game, even with semichisel, and have adjusted my technique to maintain some sense of sharpness in the chain.
 
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