Work Photos

Matias said:
I have heard that the resins harden like glass after lightning stike and they get way harder to cut. Like, keep a bunch of extra chains for that day level hard.
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Aleppo pine does that drying in the desert. Make you keep stopping to check your chain because it feels like you hit something and rounded the cutters off. Chain has to be sharp and a little aggressive to bite but not too much or will grab. The window gets very narrow.
 
Cereal_Killer said:
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61” oak, biggest we’ve done in a while. I got to hang out with the crew all day too (I do sales when I’m not consulting for municipal work now so I’m rarely on production any more, been like this since April and I miss it so it was a blast even though it was 95° out)
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Hey, nice crane! We use the same model a couple days a week. It's a great size for trees.
 
chiselbit said:
Bet that crazy top was “fun”.
“Where should we build our new greenhouse? Oh, I know. Let’s put it under the biggest tree on the property!”
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Pretty much!

We had a customer years ago build a glass sunroom and install a new shed under the tree we were supposed to remove in his back yard. All the construction happened between our quoting the job and our crew doing it. Poor crew thought the estimator was crazy when they arrived and saw the tree, which was written up to be felled and cleaned up in two hours.
 
southsoundtree said:


This would work aloft, too, but I'd normally done from the ground.
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Thanks for the response.
I've done that, just not retrieved it as the tree was coming down and it was only to set a running bowling.
I thought I might need to do that utilizing a tree that I needed to drop first, in order to get another that had a huge bow in it over a barn, ended up there was a bunch of branches that worked great.
Unfortunately I got my throw bag stuck in two trees that day, kinda frustrating, but I'm sure you have it way worse with the height of the trees out there. I always have plenty of spares and grabbed my old trusty dried out as heck line and bag, hit it first shot. It was an easy shot, that's what made it even more frustrating, stupid little branch crotch caught it...
Tree I was going to use to help set my bull rope.
1st one behind it.
Second one.
Did this one after the two smaller ones, it's the larger one to the left in the videos when looking from the tractor. 28" on the 462 with smaller dogs didn't quite reach.
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I got it installed ages ago, but have finally put enough use on my winch to really start to understand it and where to best implement it. It's a Warn 16.5ti (16,500 pound, sort of the most powerful, 'top brand' electric truck winch on the market) in a steel ARB bumper on my F350 diesel.

I've always known electric winches are not made for material moving, aka skidding brush again and again to a chipper or whatever, and I have a Bandit 12XP with the 5,000 pound hydro winch for that. Electric winches are SLOW. Expectations were to use it for pulling over trees, self-recovery if/when I get stuck, and occasional log skidding. Setting a pull-line in a big fir, or a back-leaning fir and using the winch to pull it over is great assuming you can get the truck to the right place, or use 1-2 redirect blocks to get there. With felling usually being a short-duration pull, I keep the truck off so I can hear everything happening, and have a ton of control on the pull as well as having a decent sense of the force it's putting on by listening to the noise it makes. Haven't gotten stuck yet, so I haven't used it for that, but I'm sure I will. I've heard a rule of thumb for winch size is 1.5x the vehicle weight, and my truck with the chipper isn't light, so the winch size is fitting there. I'm sure a cheaper and less expensive winch would so most or all of the same things the 'fancy' Warn does. I have a Harbor Freight one I'll be putting on my van at some point, and a SuperWinch that will go on one of my chip trucks.

As far as skidding logs, that's what all the below photos are of, in the last week. On these repeated and heavy pulls, I keep the truck idling so I don't drain the battery as winching takes a fair amount of power. I pulled a fallen tree off the beach, and felled some trees into a clearing then using a redirect, winched the logs back into the brush out of the way after chipping all the smaller material. The back and forth of most winching is slow, but these logs are all bigger than the photos make them look. I know from experience the chipper winch would have struggled or outright not been able to move them. On the beach, since the winch is always on the truck I just showed up and got it done with just that rig. On the clearing, we'd have had to fight to turn the truck and chipper around in a tight space and then cut most of the logs in half to move them with the less powerful chipper winch. Having a winch on each end of the combination is very helpful. I'm a winch fan for sure.

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The limit of the electric winch is duty cycle. It pays to research and abide by that. Also, don’t operate them with low power very much.

A pulley can double the pull force and halve the speed or double the speed and halve the force for dragging brush. Put pulley on the end of winch line. Anchor one end of another rope or cable to a tree. Other end to brush to be dragged. Zoomzoom
 
Also worm drive winches are better than planetary as rule, whether electric or hydraulic. No load line speed isn’t as fast, but loaded doesn’t slow down. Also, a worm drive needs much less braking as power cannot flow backwards thru a worm drive.

I used and abused a used warn 12k for decades. The motor finally burned up. I think too many long pull and not enough juice all the time. I have a used 15k now, but it sounds bad while spooling out, need to diag.
 
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