A Better Way to Take Down Big Wood

Hi, my name is Blair Glen I am ISA certified arborist and the owner of Saratoga Tree Service. I have been in this business for 35 years and we have done a lot of big removals. When you are dealing with big wood there are a lot of ways of getting the tree down safely principally in the past we have done a lot roping but when you have a situation were you cannot you get a crane in or you cannot safely get the pieces down sometime you just going to muscle. So I came up with the idea here quit a few years ago and it is a little bit of a take off I know a lot of climbers you have done for decades and when you have taken a piece of wood that just to big and you are cutting with a chainsaw. The last thing that happens is it as you were cutting it of it falls down and pinches the saw. So most climbers take a bunch of sticks and keep them on there pocket and they will put the sticks in there as a bridge so they can get the saw blade out easier. But we have taken a one-step further and we have taken this quarter inch dolls and we use those as rollers. Because you certainly want to get the tree down in these bigger pieces, you can that you can comfortably get it out of the yard.

Now obviously some pieces just need to be drop carefully on to a pile or a pad and certain pieces can be manage this way. But when you get down to the big wood you know even a piece of fore wood length a 18, 20 inches is going to weight hundreds of pounds sometime 4, 5 hundred pounds the water weight is tremendous. Now if you cut this of the traditional way just cut it all the way trough and put a few little sticks in there ultimately you end up with a piece of wood that you got to muscle up of there and you do not have a whole lot of control with. But if you utilize my technique of taking this dowels I spray painted orange by the way just because when you drop them of they are easier to find in the brush because you want to reuse them. You take the saw you cut about two thirds the way through and you insert a dowel crosswise for the direction you wanted to go and then when you get near the very end of the cut you put in the final dowel in the same lineup as the other one and it zips it of. Because the dowels are thick, enough quarter inches to represent the thickness of the curve the chain saw bar comes out easy it never pinches.

It is important to try to keep your cuts as flat as possible because when you are using dowels when you cut it off you do not want gravity to take over you want to be in control. So you line it up and you decide which way you wanted to go and you put your dowels in accordingly. Here you can see George he got it zip of and just setting on the dowels now because we got a fence directly underneath it we went one step further and George had a one of the guys tire a rope around it just to give a little bit of extra momentum. So it will go a little bit further into the neighboring yard and as you can see here it just one handed. He is able to quickly push this piece of and the ropes helps guided down and keep it in the right path way and give a little bit more projectory but dowel technique is just incredible for moving heavy pieces of wood. Now I have use this same technique for much larger pieces of woods sometimes six or eight feet long and I guess your only limitation is if you exceed the capacity of what the dowels are able to hold. Now they are going to be good hardwood dowels you do not want to crush them but I think anything up to a couple of thousand pounds is very durable.

Now once it is safely on the ground that is a whole another story then it is up to the ground prude to either cut it up or figure out how to get it out of there on a dowel. I challenge you to try this. You know a lot of tree climbers are pretty stubborn. They have done the same thing for years and years and years but I tell you after 35 years of doing this my back does not feel the way it use to and this technique really works it is fast it is simple it saves you time saves your back and it certainly saves you a lot of aggravation. Now once again my name is Blair Glen thanks for taking the time to view this little presentation.


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