Harvesting a LARGE Tree

Untitled We came, we sawed, we conquered. It was a bit of an adventure. No one got hurt, although we did manage to end up looking like pigs wallowing in the mud. At the time I came into this tree, we had had no rain for about a month here in eastern PA. It started raining early Monday morning, the day we intended to start cutting, and did not let up until just after we started to cut on Tuesday. For the entertainment of those interested, I have, or more accurately SWMBO has, chronicled our day with the camera.



Here is a picture of me standing by this enormous tree. For a scale reference, I am 6' 2" and about 360 lbs. By checking the leaves against a reference source, I determined it was hard, or sugar maple. I had estimated it to be about 40" in diameter. I called a good friend and fellow turner Jim Fazio, and asked if he would be willing to help me cut it up for a share of the loot. Jim is a great guy, and didn't even want all that much wood. I had to force some on him, but he spent the day with me up to our ankles in mud and water sawing this thing up. We have worked together like this numerous times in the past, and it is always a comfort to work with someone who you know and trust, especially with large chain saws. For all you safety guys out there, we were wearing saftey glasses, hearing protectors (ear plugs), and steel toed boots.



We decided to attack the tree from all sides. It was sort of like the paintings of cavemen swarming around the carcass of the wooly mammoth. Our first cuts were to the lead coming off the trunk which was sticking up in the air. This feat was performed by Jim, who likes to work without a net.



After Jim dropped the aerial lead, I went to work on the one of the two supporting the tree. We had hoped to have some help with the root ball from the heavy equipment guys who were on the construction site, but they were no where to be found. So we decided to lighten the load incrementally, allowing the root to move to a more stable position. By sawing off the second lead in lengths of the 16"-18" range, we were able to move the tree tiny bits at a time as the top was lightened. After the cut you see me making in the above picture, the root ball rotated very slowly and gently away from us, settling to a much more stable and advantageous position for us. Not only was the center of gravity lowered significantly, the roots tipped slightly away from where we were instead of towards as they had previously.



Here I am beginning the first cut to remove the trunk from the roots. We had stuffed some small logs and a bunch of branches under the trunk to keep it out of the mud. Jim and SWMBO kept watch from two different perspectives to help me watch for any movement on the part of the trunk. You can see that the aspect of the root ball is significantly lower now. I very quickly buried my 28" bar, but continued the cut all the way down until the saw exited the "bottom" of the trunk. I made a second cut on the opposite side, and was almost down to the bottom when we saw the trunk starting to move. It had only shifted a few inches, but it was time to go to Plan B for getting it off the roots.



Here is where SWMBO got into the act actively. She got to be the "heavy equipment operator", since I was dragging about 10 lbs of mud around on my boots. Jim and I combined our two towing straps, looping them around the high lead (it was the one I had been cutting on the ground before the tree rotated), and hitched the whole thing up to my truck. With the two straps combined, we had 40 feet of strap with a 20,000 lb test, so we figured we were safe. As it was, she only had to back the truck up for a few feet, and the last few inches of trunk cracked free. Again, it was unexpectedly gentle and smooth as it happened. It tuned out I was a little off in my estimate of the trunk size, at least at the base. We measured it in several places, as it was somewhat irregular. The widest spot was 48" across, with the narrowest being about 44".



Jim picked up where I left off cutting the trunk. By alternating cuts as we did, we were able to conserve our strength and pace ourselves for the heavy lifting to come. He is using a Shindaiwa saw, with roughly the same size engine as my Stihl 046, and with a 28" bar as well.



After a little more than six hours of hard cutting, we began to load the trucks. Here is a shot of mine, with just enough room left over for equipment. I had seen some figure in the wood when I first surveyed the tree, and was very excited about it. As we began to cut the large leads, we saw no figure at all, and were becoming a little discouraged at the thought of all this work for plain ole maple. Once we got into the trunk though, we found lots of very tight curl, typical of the curly hard maple I have seen in the past. I told a friend of mine if it was any curlier, we would have had to unscrew it from the stump. It doesn't look like a lot, but there is well over 1500 lbs back there, in about six big pieces. The small piece on the tailgate was cut from a section that wasn't big, but has incredible figure. It is for a friend of mine out west who like to make boxes out of figured maple. There were about two more truckloads of the big stuff, which we picked up the next day. We cut out the pith right on the spot for the big logs. They were a little over 40" in diameter for the most part, and the trunk was starting to rot. Even doing it that way, we ended up with chunks weighing in at over 300 lbs for some of them.



We had to ham it up a little. Despite the mud and the rain, we had a great day. There were no injuries, and everything went even better than we anticipated. I have a way of explaining that (and Jim believes the same things I do), but I won't go into that here. If you're interested in finding out what I mean, click here.