Shopsmith Forums

jmchale wrote:This creates a hinge that should guide the tree down in the direction you want it to fall.

UNLESS the wind catches it and it falls the other way.

For those who wish to study up on how to use a chainsaw, here's a link to some excellent training documents by the Department of Agriculture Forestry Service.

http://www.fs.fed.us/t-d/php/library_ca ... 667%202C01

foxtrapper;

thanks for the excellent link. Its a great resource and is now one of my "Favorites." Very clear description of falling procedure with good illustrations.

My youngest popped in yesterday so I mentioned this thread:

'I've done it' says he. Seems it went down without a hitch, then was sawed into firewood.

He was interested in the replies here and has taken them on board for future ventures.

I dropped a tree just north of the house yesterday. It was a Norway Spruce that died from 2 bad drought years in a row and a lot of competing trees. It was 24" across at 2' up on the stump but was fairly short, maybe 30' tall. I took a lot of time cutting it since it was dead. Dead trees are harder to predict since they can snap quickly where a live tree will maintain a hinge if properly cut. This one was hugging another with a lot of limbs and didn't want to fall over at first. It was also standing very straight upright. I like a tree that is already leaning a little. I used a few wedges in the back cut to start it leaning before I cut it very far.

I have cut thousands of trees over the last 59 years. When my parents bought this farm and leased the farm across the road they had both become badly overgrown for about 50 years. Mostly with honey locust thorn trees with huge long thorns. I was hanging onto the other end of a crosscut saw by the time I was 10 (my father never owned a chainsaw until about 1959). We had pretty much cleared these farms by then. By age 12 or 13 I was dropping trees alone with an ax and a one man saw. We rarely cut one up since we never burned wood at that time. I started burning wood in 1965 after I was married a couple of years and bought a drafty old uninsulated house. We used a small dozer a lot in the 1950's and if there was much concern about which way one was going to fall we would attach a heavy long cable around it up as high as we could get it and put a pull against it to get it going in the right direction. Cut trees were then dragged or pushed into huge brush piles and burned. In those days around here there was not a market for smaller logs under about 16" and not much more of a market for bigger stuff. Almost nobody was burning wood in the 1950's either. A few folks were still burning coal but nobody wanted to mess with the wood. At home we heated with oil.
The 17 acre mini farm I have over in the next county (we have had it over 40 years) is all trees, rocks and river. It has provided a lot of firewood for me since the mid 1960's. I have always burned wood in at least one stove and at times was feeding 3 stoves including a store building in town. I also sold firewood for many years. It makes me tired to think about how many chainsaw chains (and chainsaws too for that matter) I have worn out over those years. I sort of forget now what it was like to have that much energy.

BTW, I will not be trying to saw this log into lumber. It had half a zillion limbs on it and tapers down pretty fast as it went up. That was part of the problem cutting it. It took a lot of limbing work just to get to the trunk to cut it down safely and it almost didn't have enough weight up high in the top to help make it fall over... This one will go through the wood furnace.

For those not familiar this is what a "one man saw" looks like...
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