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 .

8 comments:

  1. Thje death of an old giant... Hope you can get good planks out of that huge log.

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    1. Unfortunately 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.

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  2. That 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.

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    1. It 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.

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  3. There's enough stump there to be worth sawing, if there's no metal in it.

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    1. Where 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 .

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  4. Man, 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.

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    1. Out 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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