Classic Removal

[Axman]

I have a sister thread over at the Tree House with a few more details, but thought I would post it here also. This is good example of what can happen if you don't use a proper face cut, back cut and a good hinge with a pull line. The poor homeowner attempted to take this tree down on his own and didn't know what he was doing and the tree landed on his neighbors house. My guess is he made a notch with that slanting back cut, tree leaned back and he wedged it, continued to cut and the tree slid right off the stump staying upright and the heavy side took it over into the neighbors yard and onto their house also breaking their fence.

Larry

 

[glens]

It would have worked even with that back-cut if he'd have used a hinge; any at all.

 

[Kevin]

I see some hinge wood on the neighbors side .
Most likely cut through the hinge leaving some holding wood on the neighbors side which pulled the tree over.

 

[BigJon]

I think it looks good. A run to home depot and two sections of fence and he's back in buisness. He still saved a few bucks. /forum/images/graemlins/pbj.gif

 

[Mark Chisholm]

You're probably right. It looks like it never moved to far before it slid off. I'd say that the wedge is what helped to lift it off of the stump. Multiple bad decisions there.

 

[RogerM]

He may have saved a few bucks, but how many years off his life did he lose with the pucker factor. He may be in "depends" sooner than he thinks.

 

[glens]

[ QUOTE ]
I see some hinge wood on the neighbors side .
Most likely cut through the hinge leaving some holding wood on the neighbors side which pulled the tree over.

[/ QUOTE ]It looks like hinge wood on the bottom of the stem (I agree it was on the neighbor's side of the cut) but there is absolutely no evidence of any hinge on the stump. Therefore I have to go with that portion which looks like hinge actually being the result of the stem landing on that corner when it hit the ground. It crushed that fiber and pivoted on it. Again, there is no hinge evident anywhere on the stump.

It's possible there was some hinge at an early stage; that the tree hung in the neighbor's tree; and that the hinge was cut through while trying to get the tree to go anyway.

Yeah, some money was saved all right...

 

[Kevin]

If you look at the stump shot you can see there's more wood on the neighbors side.

 

[glens]

I don't see what you're "seeing"; sorry. The first time I saw the original pic I thought that was hinge wood too, but it cannot be.

Commented image attached.

 

[Axman]

I think your right Glens about that Hackberry being the last deciding factor that guided the tree over the way it did. The Hackberry was kind of one sided from all the years of that Tulip tree growing to the west of it. The Hackberry had enough limbs on that side to cause a hangup for the Tulip to fall in the right direction. The guy was taking a big chance as it was doing it the way he was going about it. Even if he could of got the tree going in the right direction the Hackberry could have pushed it the other way and possible onto the corner of his own house, it was tight for doing a one cut drop.

It is amazing how much even small dia. limbs can throw a falling bigger tree off it's intended line of fall. Many people call and say to me that I can just drop the tree which is rarely the case. They don't really look up at surrounding trees or if you point out a wire they say "where did that wire come from I never saw that before ".

Larry

 

[glens]

Got a link to the discussion at the other site? Are there more pics there?

Maybe in this case it was a good thing there was a sloped back cut. With the evident lack of hinge, the wedge very well could have become the pivot point, with the tree spinning off and even more to the right of the intended lay; or to the left -- straight away from the hackberry.

I've successfully retrieved hung trees by cutting a pocket in the back and using a bottle jack; but I tend toward too much hinge rather than not enough (though never [yet] so much as to cause a barber-chair).

 

[Colin]

Here you go Glen's

http://gypoclimber.com/treehouse/viewtopic.php?t=4273

 

[Toparboring]

I see that he did cut throught the hinge wood , but if you look you can see that he was rocking the saw while he was cuting do to the stump being chewed up in his cut. Which in doing this he was probable rocking it back for his final cut and cut down past the hinge and well the rest is right in the pict. I did notice the power lines up above. As Axman said it looks one sided most of the weight probably twisted it off.

 

[glens]

Thanks.

Doesn't look like enough damage was done to the house to get past the deductible. Was the gutter even knocked loose?

 

[Kevin]

Glens, never use a car jack on a tree, there's no way to tell what the pressure is, use a tree jack to lift a tree.
The stump shot is in the attachment.

 

[glens]

I agree that an hydraulic jack which has the pump remote from the cylinder would be the safest setup, but it's like the helo logging: either it'll lift it or it won't. One bad thing about having a remote pump is it would be tempting to not continually fill the gap in the back cut with solid material as backup. Whenever you do that you're right by the lifting cylinder in either case, and a blown seal allowing a high-pressure oil spray is the danger you're looking at, so there's ultimately no difference. And I'm talking about a jack a bit larger than the Chinese 6-ton bottle you can get at Wal-Mart for a couple of bucks.

The only thing I'm seeing in your stump shot is that there may have been a 1/2"-thick hinge about 6" wide right in the middle. Evidently that's not what you're wanting me to see. Could you describe it? Thanks.

 

[Kevin]

When you picture the bar coming in on the felling cut there's a point at which there is some hinge wood.
If you picture a hinge in place there's more holding wood on the neighbors side given the back cut is equal all the way across.
Look at the taper in the stump shot, not the stump picture.
Granted he cut the hinge off but the tree may have started to pull before the hinge was completely severed.
Sheer speculation.

If your bottle jack fails during a standard felling operation where's the tree going?
There's more at stake than losing a little fluid.

 

[glens]

I somehow get the feeling we're not as much on different pages as it may seem due to differing terminology maybe.

If the jack fails the tree ain't going nowhere. The back cut is continually being filled with solid material (okay, maybe it'll sit back a half inch from any given point). In any event it's a rare situation I'm talking about; not a matter of course.

Looking at the stump it's obvious the back cut and the notch are in different lateral planes. Looking at the base of the stem it would seem the notch was the more perpendicular-to-the-stem of the two. That's why the hinge would have been taller on the neighbor's side of the cuts. Is that what you're calling "more hinge"? The fact that it would have been taller? Usually, in my experience, that would make it more flexible if fore-aft thickness were consistent and thus not tending to pull to that side.

I feel just about any one of us here could flesh this thing out, but what the heck. Let's look at what we can discern as facts:

The tree was growing near a larger one. As a result it was growing away from it. Looking up the stem as it lay there it seems obvious that was the situation. Except for a couple of low branches going toward the larger tree, the stem veers away from it. The balance would seem to favor falling away from the neighbor tree had the hinge been a centrally-located cylinder.

Acknowledging that, the fact that the tree actually went rather toward the other tree would indicate it was at some point in time being held by branches from that other tree.

The wires overhead, [edit: just looked at the picture again and instead of being wires running over "our" head, I think that it's an antenna tower, so never mind the rest of this paragraph] if they were low enough to have been the cause of interference, seem to indicate they would have guided the tree almost 180° the other way from the direction it fell. They appear to be going away and to "our" left from the tree as they pass over "our" head. So I think we can rule them out from being a factor here.

I posit that the tree started to go as expected but was held very early by the neighboring tree. The feller drove the wedge in which either caused the insufficient hinge to fail or that the hinge was subsequently made insufficient. Either way, it failed.

The tree slid down and to the left on the back cut which slopes both those directions. Whether the tree top then slid down the limbs which were holding it at the top, toward the neighboring tree, or the balance was now merely decidedly in that favor due to the base now being further left than it was, we see the result.

I don't believe the hinge proportions from side-to-side are responsible in any way.

If it weren't a matter of an insufficient hinge, the top of the back cut where the wedge was inserted would have split ("barber-chaired") down and away. It seems it did not, so there couldn't have been very much pressure exerted by the "felling" wedge.

Overall this was actually quite close to being a successful operation in the end. There seems to have been no real damage to the house beyond perhaps a couple of roughed-up shingle edges; just a section of fence and perhaps a limb on the larger tree. The guy may even get called by another neighbor in the future $500 to get that tree down is a bit of a bargain, after all...

 

[Axman]

You are a good detective Glens, especially in the aftermath of the damage done to the neighbor's house that the tree fell on. The gutter wasn't even taken off the house, the gutter was just mangled and will need replacement along with a few shingles. I doubt there was any more damage done to the house than that, it was basically the tips of the Tulip tree that landed on the house. Like you said probaly won't go past the dedeuctable on the insurance policy, which is always a sore subject to me when things like this happen after wind storms, usually not enough damge to get past the average deductable, but yet the homeowners think they are covered in full and end up paying out of their pockets in the end, which can take a while to collect in some cases.

In this case, which is the way I like it when dealing with insurance companies is that they call us directly to go ahead and do a job, we also have a claim number to go along with the bill. We will see what happens on this one. I hope I don't have to go back on the homeowner to collect the deductable.

Larry

 

[Kevin]

I didn't see where the branches were touching but if they were then everything changes.
Did he use the wedge to trip the tree then cut the hinge off later or was the tree held by the branches above and there was no hinge in place at all, I don't know.
Bottle jacks are dangerous in place of tree jacks, there's no way to gauge pressure and the bottle jacks themselves become tippy due to less surface area.
It needs to be mentioned because it is not the right tool for the job.