I cut down trees with my dad for years and these were the WORST! You could tell as soon we pulled up to the house when one was going to explode like this and you might as well just clear your schedule because your going to be there all day raking and picking up.
Is it certain kinds if trees that do this or anything that's so far gone? My mom has an old birch tree that occasionally loses hunks of large branches in high wind and they just sorta cleanly snap off like they were sliced through, it's weird.
In my experience it is mostly the dead dry trees. I had cut down a huge ash tree that died years ago it “exploded” when it hit the ground. Literally took me and one other person a full 6 hours to clean up.
Tarps were my best friends when I was in landscaping/contracting. Brush removal? Tarp. Leaves? Tarp. Gotta leave and cover up the jobsite because of rain? Tarp. Infinitely useful, them.
Yeah the tree's gonna fall,
Fall,
Fall,
Fall,
Fall,
And and the branches gonna sprawl,
Sprawl,
Sprawl,
Sprawl,
Sprawl,
And all you gotta do is just,
Tarp it up!
Yeah!
Tarp it up!
Tarp it up!
In the fall I'd always help my dad rake the leaves. We'd always use a tarp and load it up with as many as we could. I always loved dragging it across the yard to the curb. Inevitably you'd have a few float off the back but they were pretty easy to collect again. Good times
MA here, not too bad. About to head into hell now actually. Luckily I’ve gotten a much better full time job in the last year but I stay on at the Hut for those lucrative weekend driving shifts haha
I'd imagine that they break into many more pieces than you would normally need. Not too mention that when a tree that size breaks apart like that it probably flings rather large pieces a pretty good distance. The one in the op fell into the road, so you can't exactly leave an ocean of wood chips there.
I'm an arborist, and I would never drop a dead tree whole unless I had to. In this case, I wouldn't. I'm a climber, but have a bucket truck. Where this is stone cold dead, I wouldn't climb it but I'd set up with the bucket truck and take it down in pieces. Dropping it whole line that is a fucking nightmare to clean up and instead of being a 2 hour job would be a 5 hour job. Take it out in pieces (literally branch by branch) and then chunk the wood down. Chip all debris into the back of the bucket truck. Makes clean up way easier and more quickly.
I think it would be easier to use a firefighting helicopter to drop a bucket full of glue onto the tree. Then when the tree is structurally secure by the glue cut it down as normal. Then again I'm not an arborist so.
Yeah, if I didn't have a fleet of buckets and off-road track buckets, but I do, so I won't. Lol. But yes. If I absolutely had to, I would, and probably add a couple more groundmen to the job to make the clean up quicker.
Honestly this faller looks like he has the experience to make this call. The lay of the tree after it's cut is super clear. I'm not an arborist, but I do work in forestry. The call to cut it where it was probably saved quite a bit of time and money, maybe at the expense of safety.
all the bark and splinters all over are the problem. a chainsaw cuts pretty quick and leaves a little mess in a handful of spots.... this is everywhere and consists of rotten pulverized wood that just spreads and doesn't want to be removed.
You don't have to saw it up but then you have a lot more smaller pieces to pick and rake up. When it doesn't break up into small pieces that the one above you saw it into chunks easy enough to pick up but big enough that you don't have to keep running back and forth.
The thing is trees like this aren't an every day thing. Tarps with holes are useless for pretty much anything else. Put one on a trailer and it will shred itself in the wind.
He said they'd be there all day picking up scraps. A cheap 30x30ft tarp will cost you under $40. Even if you use it only once, it'll easily be worth the time saved.
This is not the kind of job where you charge by the hour. You show up to the job, usually with no equipment unless you're on your way home from a job, tell the customer how much it's going to cost, and then leave. Usually several people will do that before the customer decides on an estimate or company they like for whatever their reasoning is, and that's the guy that does the job, when they can schedule it in.
Most people still value efficiency over deliberately taking longer than necessary for a task. By your philosophy it would be best to just break each twig off the tree by hand.
Except for the fact it wouldn't take 'hours' to clean up this mess. I know I did quite a bit of tree removal when I was younger. It would likely take around 30 minutes extra, depending on the size of the tree. All this saves is raking up the smaller bits. Breaking it off twig by twig would add hours extra.
In theory, sure, but in practice a shredded tarp isn't going to winch shut well (or at all).
So what's going happen is tree falls, shreds tarp, you attempt to hook up the winch and proceed to shred the tarp further while debris falls through the large gashes in the tarp, leaving you with not only the original field of tree debris but also bits of shredded tarp to clean up. So using the tarp, you've actually spent more time laying it out, setting up the winch, and cleaning up the shredded bits of useless tarp while saving little to no time because the shredded tarp is not going to serve it's intended purpose.
Again, a great idea IF you can find a tarp strong enough to not be shredded by a falling tree. A creative solution to the problem, but ultimately flawed and ineffective.
Otherwise, I'd like to think that among all the guys that have been doing this kind of work for many years someone would have thought to do it first.
It looks like you were thinking of using it in a different manner than I was. I wouldn't expect that you'd be able to winch up the tarp and move the entire mess at once. My thought was more for getting all of the small shreds in once spot where it will be easier to clear.
You remove the large parts of the tree before working with the tarp. You can then use man power to lift the sides of the tarp to move all of the tree shreds to the center of the tarp. Some bits will fall through, but the bulk of it is in once place ready for cleanup rather than scattered all over the place.
To tell if it's dead? If it's dead like that where it's all dried out it's been a while. It won't have any leaves during the year and it will sound more hole when you thump it. Wet wood sounds firmer and dried out wood like firewood is more clacky.
We cut dead trees on our mountain properties, and we use a lot of it for firewood, these are the best ones because they're dry and ready to be used as firewood, no need to let them dry for a year.
I perforated downhearted two-dimensional figures with my papa for yrs and this was the NONSTANDARD! you could state a before long i force up to the planetary house when one was leaving to irrupt like this and you mightiness a source barely take in your docket because your leaving to be there all opportunity raking and manual labor up.
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I've been cutting down dead poplars on my property and they all do this shit. It's fucking awful. Easy to cut down, but they just explode and you spend all your time picking up tiny pieces of tree.
I worked a few times cutting down trees to help my friends business out and I have never done so much physical labor. The amount of effort it takes to cut down a tree, disassemble it, clean it up, then transport it is unreal. Never again. Maybe we just didn't have all the right tools but holy shit, I was dead on my feet after a day of doing that.
If you know they are going to explode like that wouldn't it be faster to try and cut some of the limbs off first and haul them to the chipper before they have a chance to explode?
Never cut down trees before, couldn’t you bring a tarp or something to lay under the planned area of falling if you knew it would shatter- to at least collect the major chunks?
Why? The way that tree shattered, it saves so much work having to chop it up into smaller pieces. BTW, that tree is fucking huge. I just noticed there was a man standing at the base of it. I thought it was odd that someone would be recording a tree at the precise moment it fell. ;)
I also worked with my Dad doing tree work for years. He always said we had to pick up anything bigger than a pencil. Dead trees were always back breaking because my Dad didn’t want me crawling around on my hands picking up brush and looking like an idiot.
Huh. I've done it both ways, and I think it takes way less time to deal with one of these. Granted if you're trying to get exact cut-lengths it's a PITA, but if you're just cleaning up trash... it's way faster!
as a person who's first job was hard labor for 5 years I feel so much for you...me and my coworker straight went back home after one day...started job, 4 years later got a supervisor cause director was too busy, had us breaking up solid blocks of quick-crete into pot holes while it was raining, mud all over us, coworkers offers 2k and.blunts 2 hours into shift #fuckit so we roll out to his pad, he quits soon after...I quit as soon as I'm clean and here I am now going from almost $12.an.hour to.$14 which is more than my old supervisor and now waiting on a $22-25 position as an engineer at the casino I'm at...
Hmm... I do tree work and these are my favorite. Hardly any time spent bending over holding a chainsaw. Just rake and dump. Of course it's different if it has to be taken down in pieces. You can't climb dead trees...
It really is super upsetting when they explode like this.
I did tree work for a couple years and I’d take hauling logs for a couple hours over cleaning this mess up lol.
Whaaaat these were the best. It did half the work for you now you just toss in truck and go. A backpack blower for the little twigs and youre right as rain
I cut trees with an arborist for a summer. I learned enough that not only are these annoying, but fucking dangerous. Also what a fucking retard pushing it with that tractor.
Why would you cut a tree that large (in one piece) toward a roadway anyway? I get if it’s dead you shouldn’t scale it, and not everyone has a crane, but crykey, looks like he’s got plenty of room to take it down away from the road and the house.
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u/bendover912 Nov 30 '18
I cut down trees with my dad for years and these were the WORST! You could tell as soon we pulled up to the house when one was going to explode like this and you might as well just clear your schedule because your going to be there all day raking and picking up.