Sunday, November 5, 2017
Bucking up one gigantic pine tree
This week I have been working on cutting up some of the big pine trees Sunday's wind storm took down at my parents' place . Saturday I had Annie with me so she got some pictures of me cutting up the one that fell across the raspberry patch up by the road .
Those pines have a very shallow root system and the root ball just pulled out of the ground . It has to be twelve feet tall and sixteen feet across . Humongous when you stand next to it but not much when you consider the tree has to be about one hundred and twenty feet tall . The log has to be a good thirty six inches across at the stump where I am cutting .
The bar on my old Stihl W028 was not nearly long enough and I had to work it from both sides . Drove some wedges in the cut so it would not pinch the bar .
After a good bit of work I got through it and the stump starts to pull away from the log as the root ball springs back in to place .
Here is the next shot just as the stump is almost all the way upright . Note the dust cloud .
And with a big dust cloud and a thump it went right back to where it has lived for the last two hundred years .
That is one big log .
Stump sitting back upright . That bit above ground is about five feet tall . I'll cut a hole in the top and mom can plant flowers in it .
Limbing it out .
And bucking it up into lengths I can move .
A nice afternoon shot of the recently restored neighbor's place , our family connection to Maine . Used to belong to the family that took dad in during his college days back in the nineteen fifties . The old farm dates back to the mid seventeen hundreds .
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Thje death of an old giant... Hope you can get good planks out of that huge log.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately that one forks in two pretty quick so there is no real nice straight clear lumber in it... I think I might just make big thick baloney slices out of the fat end and make some furniture and big cutting boards out of it.
DeleteThat was monster. Good thing it didn't land on anything important. I've a couple of pines around that size and I'm glad they survived the storm. There's a stand of 4 monster hemlocks around my house almost as big. Right now I think they help support each other. If one goes I might consider taking them all down.
ReplyDeleteIt is the biggest tree I have ever worked on. Glad I did not have to take it down myself. No damage, as it landed on the raspberry patch. That will recover. Took a walk in the woods behind their house and there has to be a few hundred trees down back in there. The state park at the end of Wolfe's Neck Rd looks like a war zone.
DeleteThere's enough stump there to be worth sawing, if there's no metal in it.
ReplyDeleteWhere was barbed wire and ceramic insulators embedded in that stump , the place used to be a dairy farm . We have killed several chains that way before . That is one reason I cut it up high. Not sure there is much salvageable lumber in that one .
DeleteMan, that's one hell of a job. I have got to the point where I just let the blow downs lay unless I have to cut them up for a reason.
ReplyDeleteOut back behind the house there is a couple hundred more , I'll be leaving those where they fell . I am just cleaning up the ones that are out in the open areas near the house. Its seven of them about that size in total . Trouble is dad spent the lat thirty five years getting the back forty all neat and tidy and now it is a big mes again .
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