pics from my job this week.

Joshua,

The last picture has looked strange to me. What I've interpretted is that the bark seems to change mid-trunk, but it really is that the 2 pruned branches are visually overlapping with the trunk above. It looks like the removed piece tore down the trunk a bit. Are these stubs with the tears that will be pruned to the collar, or are these your final cuts.

If they are your final cuts, then you might need a bigger undercut on your drop cuts.


Question to all:
Do you keep your lanyard tail clipped to your harness, let it dangle, or daisychain it, most often?

I use a steelcore lanyard frequently (removal or pruning, I don't mind the extra weight usually), so daisychaining isn't really an option. I let it dangle. I fear that I will drop a limb and have it snag that loop formed by the tail clipped up to the harness. If I'm using a rope lanyard, I'll typically daisy chain the tail, or be using it without a stopper knot for the ability to slide the friction hitch adjuster off the end as an alternative to using a "breakaway" lanyard, if working in a sketchy tree with a climbline set in a strong tree.

Thoughts?
 
the angle of the picture is wierd so they look like stubs. those are the final cuts and they were made just out side of the branch collar. about and inch or so. i resist flush cutting as mush as possible.
the bark on these tree's are sooooooo soft that some tearing almost always happens. it doesn't matter weather you make your final cut on a big stub or a really thin/small one, there is gonna be some tearing on the edges no matter what you do. i asked a couple of my friends here about it and they said they have the same issue with eucalyptus robusta bark being verrry prone to tearing.

i normally let my lanyard tail hang in brushy tree's but it this one i didn't becuase it wasn't a brushy tree.
 
I see.


What is to keep you from cutting less than 1" from the collar? Is it concern of hitting trunk tissue?



A trick that might work for the tear issue is to leave a last stub at about 6". You can then cut with your bar vertically, powerhead down. The stub will be resting on the body of the saw. You can have your left hand on the wrap handle, and use your pinky finger to keep the stub on the saw until you can kill the saw, and reach up to the stub with your left hand. No place for the stub to drop.



To my way of thinking, if you can't be right on the money (best case scenario, naturally, and the one to strive for as much as possible), its better to leave a bit of stub than cut into the trunk with a partial flush cut? Would others agree, again actual BC cut being optimal?
 
i was taught to make your final cut at an angle in relation to the way the branch was growing. if you cut a vertically growing branch the same way you cut a horizontally growing one you end up with a larger oval shaped wound.

pruningexample.jpg
 
Branch collars come in all different orientations.

I suggest looking at some firewood of various species. If you pull the bark off, you can get a better view of the trunk and branch fibers.

A few species have some somewhat sunken branch collars due to the undulations of the trunk. Sometimes redwoods will have bulging trunk wood around some branches. You will be flush to the trunk when you remove the branch, without "flush cutting" it (in the bad sense). You might even use the tip of the bar to remove more of the branch tissue, leaving a smoother, though "indented" branch pruning cut/ wound.

Pacific bigleaf maple, Pacific Madrone/
Madrona and Sitka Spruce are some species in my neighborhood that have somewhat-to-vary extended branch collars. I just went past some spruces on a golf course nearby, and without knowing how spruces can look in their larger branches, it would look like stub city.

I suggest that you do some debarking and dissection, as well as looking at where you see dead branches getting grown upon by live trunk tissues. The more the dead branch is intact, all else being equal, the less years since the branch tissues died, and the trunk tissues started to grow over them. The converse, where there is a little stub of a dead branch left, all else being equal, makes one think that it has been many more years that the trunk has been growning out/ over the stub. Looking at the way different pruning wounds callus over on different species also gives some indications of the quality of the final branch collar pruning cut/ wound.

You might be branch collar cutting properly. It might just be internet/ written communication. Without pictures, it is hard to know. If you use Google Images for "branch collar" and/ or "3 point cut", you will see many good photos and diagrams that give a bit more detail than your Paint picture above. Good work on putting the time into the picture to be able to get a more accurate message out to the TBers, and to be able to pick up whatever you can from the TBers.

Note that your picture (not knocking it) doesn't show a bulge beneath your 3rd cut. That is the key on the bottom of the branch collar cut, with the top typically being just outside of the branch bark ridge (BBR). Each branch is unique, some more than others. Each proper branch collar cut is based on the anatomy of that particular branch in relation to the trunk tissues.
 
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the angle of the picture is wierd so they look like stubs. those are the final cuts and they were made just out side of the branch collar. about and inch or so. i resist flush cutting as mush as possible.
the bark on these tree's are sooooooo soft that some tearing almost always happens. it doesn't matter weather you make your final cut on a big stub or a really thin/small one, there is gonna be some tearing on the edges no matter what you do. i asked a couple of my friends here about it and they said they have the same issue with eucalyptus robusta bark being verrry prone to tearing.

i normally let my lanyard tail hang in brushy tree's but it this one i didn't becuase it wasn't a brushy tree.

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What's a situation where you can't avoid a flush cut?
 
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do a careful plunge cut near the top and follow that through?

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That's how I do it. It takes some skill with the saw, but it becomes second nature quickly.

-Tom
 
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Does a 16" branch/ trunk being removed during a prune set off any warning bells?

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Not really. It could be a dead limb, old stub, codominant stem, etc. I'll admit it should be an uncommon pruning cut, but not out of the scope of cuts we need to make from time to time.

-Tom
 
I suppose I've had to do a large collar cut on a broken spruce "arm". I forget what kind of spruce it was. Possibly topped a long time ago. The "arm"came off the trunk and turned upward like an arm with a bent elbow.

If its dead and not calloused over, I can see it. If it is a calloused over stub, it might be better to leave it, situationally dependent.

Removing that size co-dominant trunk sounds like a recipe for a huge wound that would be hard to compartmentalize. What do you think?

I agree, uncommon.
 
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