Trees you've cut

[davidwyby]

Hard leaner, swing cut, momentum courtesy of Cummins.

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

Haven't posted in a while.

Summer is here and so are all the boring, annoying and time consuming hedge trimming and tree pruning jobs.

I much prefer winter work. The days are shorter so you never end up working silly hours, the weather is a lot cooler so you never overheat and the work tends to be more enjoyable.

Before and after of a leylandii hedge that hadn't been cut in a few years.






The top







I hate having to trim such neglected hedges. You never get a nice neat finish on them.

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

We have done some heavier tree work too though.

This job involved felling 40 ish big sycamore trees around a vacant house.

We chipped everything that could fit into the chipper and cut the rest into 3 meter lengths witch were stacked along the road.

We were just subbed in to do the saw work and provide the chipper, another man was the main contractor. He brought three men and an 8.5 ton digger. It took the 5 of us, digger and chipper 4 days to complete the job. Speaking to the main contractor afterwards he told me the customer had the whole job done and the a new sheep wire fence erected for less than €10,000. My end of the deal was just shy of half of that. I told the other man he was crazy to have done the job so cheap. He's one of these guys who can't lose a job.


Every tree had to be either pulled or pushed with the machine. There was a house, two phone lines, a road, a telephone pole and worst of all three phase medium voltage power lines running along the back of the trees we cut as well as a transformer and abc cable running right through them with a pole in the middle. Thre trees got a rough dismantling to avoid damaging the utilities.






You can see just how close thd three fase is in this picture. Look at the top left. These trees had been trimmed for a five meter power line clearance before.
on this particular tree we actually snapped out 12mm rigging rope because I had left massive hinge to try and avoid the tree falling sideways and hitting the lines. We then had to get another rope into the tree with the throw line and cut more of the hinge. Pretty never wracking stuff.






One of two piles of logs.

















Looking back there were so many aspects to this job that could have landed us in serious trouble with various different bodies. The main contractor would probably have been put out of business if health and safety showed up.
It was fun though.

 

[Maintenance Chief]

about a month ago.

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

Cedar from today.

 

[ferris]

@TheDarkLordChinChin
From the pics I would ask, why don’t u drop it completely. From the pics I would think that it will hit nothing

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

@TheDarkLordChinChin
From the pics I would ask, why don’t u drop it completely. From the pics I would think that it will hit nothing

It would make a huge mess in the garden and the big heavy branches would hold the trunk way up off the ground. Also, you can't see it in the photos but it was growing on a ditch with a short but steep drop on either side which would make cutting it up even more awkward and dangerous. To avoid landing the tree on this ditch I would have had to fell the tree directly away from it's lean with nothing to pull with and towards the road and the customers expensive metal fence.
We could probably have just felled it but delimbing it first and then felling the trunk didn't take any longer than just felling it.
We started at 0930 and the two of us had everything cut into firewood and everything 6 inches and under chipped by 1530.

 

[Ketchup]

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

View attachment 463029View attachment 463030

Big dead beast. What is it?

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

Okay, heres a story for you.
We did those two jobs on the same day.
One for some American blow-ins good half hour down the road and the other for some locals right beside me.

We only finished off the job for the Americans today. The priority was to get the trees on the ground, not to cut them up. They were in no panic to get the timber processed and the mess cleared.

The other job, the one for the locals was high priority. There was another storm promised and they texted me in a panic looking for that cedar tree reduced the next day.

I agreed to come to them the next day since they had been unlucky in the two previous storms. In storm Daragh in December three big leylandi trees belonging to them fell across the road and onto their neighbours house, shed and lorry. I think i posted pics of that job in this thread. In storm Eowyn in January another big leylandi tree belonging to them snapped off and crushed a different neighbours hay shed.

So I felt a bit sorry for them and came to reduce this other tree on short notice so it couldn't uproot or snap and cause more havoc. Plus, they're my neighbours and they're going to get me to cut the trees that fell into the hay shed, more on that later.

When I say they're locals, she's local. She grew up a little further down the road in a big old manor house but she spent a lot of her life in the UK. She makes designer clothes, she even made an outfit for lady gaga. He's from Dublin, south Dublin. That's the wealthy part of Dublin. He has a posh sounding second name, it's definitely far from the chainsaw that he grew up.

They bought this house half a mile from me on the urgings of her father.

I mentioned earlier that she grew up in an old manor house. That's her father's family. He has a posh second name, but he's still a Catholic. In Ireland there's a divide between catholics and protestants. It's not as a big a deal as it used to be but it's still there. The church of Ireland protestants are mostly descended from English settlers and are usually wealthier and have a reputation for meanness and keeping everything they can to themselves. They were the ruling estate here when Ireland was ruled by England. They're a small minority, most catholics don't  really consider them to be truly irish, at least implicitly. There's a lot of history there.

But this guy is a Catholic. Lives in a big fancy protestant house from hundreds of years ago, has some of the best land around and is rotten with money. He recently sold a commercial forest for 1.3 million. My friend aaron who works with me told me that his mother used to work in that house when she was a teenager. Making beds and serving breakfast. She got paid £4/day, that would have been in the 1990s.

So you get the picture I'm painting of these people, they're not exactly poor.


We did that job a month ago now and they're only just after contacting me looking to pay me. This is after not wanting to pay me what I was asking to begin with.

And that's after them trying everything they could to not pay me for the first job I did for them. In the end I agreed to let them pay me cash for that first job in exchange for me not charging them the vat. I also allowed them €100 for the woodchip, which I sold.

So they ended up paying €1600 instead of €2200. For a three day job involving three people (4 on one day) and a chipper. 6 weeks after the job was done.


You want to know what's even better? They didn't look after the people whose property the trees fell on. They made them pay half my bill, didn't fix the shed or fix the lorry. They only fixed the damage to the house.


Those trees that fell into the hay shed that I mentioned earlier? They're still lying there, the farmer still can't use his hay shed. They wouldn't even cut overhanging branches stopping him from accessing his yard. I did that pro bono when I topped the cedar. They're waiting to get clearance from they're insurance before they do anything. They might not even get the insurance to pay. They probably won't.


So they have fcuked over two next door neighbours, pissed me off no end and generally made they're bad name worse.

View attachment 453941



I told him to leave the money in an envelope in the local filling station for me but he said "he won't get there today". It's 3 miles down the road.


I think I'm going to tell him to fcuk right off when he finally gets round to cutting the trees that are lying in the hay shed.


Oh and those Americans? They tipped us €200. Last time I did a job for them they tipped €50 and gave me an old dolmar saw.


Amazing isn't it? The locals with lots and lots of money won't pay they're neighbour who was charging them "mates rates" but the foreigners who I don't think have much always pay more than I ask.

My main competition are doing a big job for these people.
Removing all the trees on the property.
I hope they get paid.

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

Some ash trees.
The stock exhaust on my 394xp set one on fire.
It was a dry, windy day and the log was full of dry fungus.
Most of the log burned out.

 

[They call me Mr. Kibbs]

Some ash trees.
The stock exhaust on my 394xp set one on fire.
It was a dry, windy day and the log was full of dry fungus.
Most of the log burned out.


View attachment 463077View attachment 463078View attachment 463079View attachment 463080

Ha, I see what you did there...."ash" trees on fire, lol
Just out of curiosity, were those EAB killed white ash? Around here the standing dead will transition from good hard wood to punky fire tinder at random locations in the trunk. Wondering if the same there

 

[Ketchup]

Big dead beast. What is it?

Hybrid Poplar.

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

Ha, I see what you did there...."ash" trees on fire, lol
Just out of curiosity, were those EAB killed white ash? Around here the standing dead will transition from good hard wood to punky fire tinder at random locations in the trunk. Wondering if the same there

We don't have that parasite here.
We do have ash dieback.
This tree had that disease and some other fungi too.
Half the main stem was completely rotten.

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

Hybrid Poplar.

We did crown reductions on some big poplars a while back. A gardener fella there said he thought they were some sort of hybrid. They were very big.

 

[Ketchup]

We did crown reductions on some big poplars a while back. A gardener fella there said he thought they were some sort of hybrid. They were very big.

Most Poplars get big. Tulips and Silvers do anyway. These are more like a Cottonwood. They grow incredibly fast. Unfortunately they’re defenseless against Cytospora and rarely make it to 40 years old. Great for business though. Probably our most common crane removal tree.

 

[TheDarkLordChinChin]

Some ash trees.
The stock exhaust on my 394xp set one on fire.
It was a dry, windy day and the log was full of dry fungus.
Most of the log burned out.


View attachment 463077View attachment 463078View attachment 463079View attachment 463080

The farmer pushed a lot of the brash from the burning log tree back into the stump.
Thus is what we found the next day.

 

[Ketchup]

The farmer pushed a lot of the brash from the burning log tree back into the stump.
Thus is what we found the next day.

View attachment 463139View attachment 463140View attachment 463141

When my Dad was clearing his land there was a big stump like that. He piled brush on it for a year or two. We lit the pile off when my wife and I got married. 5 months later we came back to build the workshop and the stump hole was still smoking. Stumps don’t die easily.

 

[oddsawz]

When my Dad was clearing his land there was a big stump like that. He piled brush on it for a year or two. We lit the pile off when my wife and I got married. 5 months later we came back to build the workshop and the stump hole was still smoking. Stumps don’t die easily.

I always figured if I did this I would start some sort of 100 year underground fire like Centralia, PA

 

[Ketchup]

I always figured if I did this I would start some sort of 100 year underground fire like Centralia, PA

We didn’t think of that. Dad’s kind of a cowboy. And the ground is just sandstone bedrock. No coal or gas for 50 miles.