No Nonsense Guide to Tree Felling. How to cut down a tree safely. FarmCraft101

Hey there, welcome back to FarmCraft. This is a no-nonsense tutorial on how to cut down a tree. You need three things on your stump to cut down a tree. One, you need a wedge. Two, you need a back cut. Um, one, you need a wedge. Two, you need a back cut. And three, you need a hinge. If I was going to drop this tree that way, you start out with your wedge. You need a decent sized wedge, enough that by the time that tree falls and the wedge closes, the tree is essentially down. About a third of the way through the tree. Then you need a hinge, which is an area of wood that you leave intact that helps guide the tree where you want it to go. Then you need a back cut, just slightly above. So here's a little junk tree. Um, really not a big deal to cut this down, but I'm going to use it just to show the basic parts of a tree felling system. The wedge is key into getting this right. You have to take your time. You have to get the wedge right. The first cut of the wedge is you want a flat cut and you want it horizontal. And your saw is going to have a mark on it and that's going to show you the direction the tree is going to want to fall. This is really where you establish what direction is this tree going. I want it to go about that way. All right, so saw's in the tree. The cut is flat and here's the line. That's where that tree is going to want to fall. All right, now I need to cut the top of the wedge. It's important to get this right and I'll show you why. My wedge looks good in that I met it a good corner. I don't have an overcut anywhere. And I'm going to show you that a little later. I'm going to do some of these wrong so that I can show you what happens. Wedge is done. The next section is the hinge and the that you leave intact. So it's like there's a board inside of that tree that's going to stay intact. You're going to come back here with a back cut and you're going to cut to that board no further. A board in that direction it'll bend like that but it's not going to let it go left or right. That's what forces the tree to fall the direction that you want it to fall. I'm in my back cut. I'm still looking at this line. It's the same line that you want the tree to fall as you did your initial cut. If you use that same line that will keep your back cut and your initial cut parallel and keep your hinge a consistent width. I've left a good two and a half inches there. There you can see about two and a half inches there. A little bit above. Two and a half inches there. A little bit above. So right now I have like a really thick board here and that's all that's holding this tree right now and if I push on it it's still too much. If this tree had any weight to it it would fall over right now but it doesn't. I bet I can push it. Here's the hinge that we left intact and then there's the back cut just slightly higher than the wedge. This will get the tree down and get it down safely. Here's another tree I'm cutting down and I'm going to cut the wedge wrong to show you what can happen if you do that. The flat cut is going further than the wedge. See the wedge is ending there and this cut continues. It's worse on the other side. Now why is that a problem? Well you can see right here as it starts to fall it's not going to get very far before that is going to hit that. And what's that going to do? It's going to turn the tree into a giant lever. It's going to create a massive upward force on your hinge and it's going to break your hinge off while the tree is essentially still vertical. And now you've got an unsafe situation because who knows how it's going to break first of all. It might splinter the whole tree, barber chair, throw things out at you, but more importantly it might just fall in whatever direction it wants because if you don't have a hinge you don't have control. So you can see because that isn't going all the way to the corner it's creating an unsafe situation. Make sure you get that right. So now I'm going to do another cut and I'm going to bring it all the way to that corner and I'm going to work on it until I get that right. Straight to the corner. I'm not over cut this way. The same thing happens if you over cut that way because that pulls the the back of cut back to here. This becomes your hinge. As soon as the tree starts falling you hit there and it creates an upward force. So that looks good. We're ready for a back cut. See my hinge was already pretty narrow. That's just like an inch and a quarter there. And then same with this side. So I reached in with the bar and I cut the center of the hinge out. So that leaves me good strength here. Good strength here. And it removed enough strength of the hinge to allow it to fall but it didn't compromise my ability to keep it from falling this way or that way. My initial cut you can see came to a good corner. Allowed that hinge the ability to flex without hitting anything and making an upward force. And my back cut came in just above this cut. And that is exactly the way I like to cut a tree. Alright we got a tree right here. It's got to lean that way. And we're going to do our wedge wrong and see what happens. Now I've chosen a tree that's not very big here because I'm not a dummy. Alright so there's my wedge. You can see the obvious over cut. As the tree starts to fall this point's going to hit down here and it's going to generate forces on this trunk that might cause it to barber chair. At the very least it's going to make it not want to fall right. So you can see the incorrectly cut wedge has stopped the tree from falling and the hinge is not able to function as it should but rather it's sitting in tension right now. The trunk also has a lot of stresses on it that could cause it to split and have other unpredictable behavior. Did you see how that hinge broke instead of guiding the tree down like it should have? The tree started falling but it hit and then I had to keep cutting on the hinge and I had to make the hinge much smaller than it should have been. And the hinge actually broke off before the tree fell. It didn't act like a hinge. This sheared because of a vertical force. On a much bigger tree this would have been pretty dangerous. On this tree not so bad. Here you can see over cutting the wedge the other way would have the same effect. Once the tree starts falling it's going to hit right here. So I've got two ash trees right here that I want to take down. The one on the left has a heavy lean to the left. It is still partially alive. There you can see how they're situated. I want to drop them in this direction. So this one is leaning that way but you can fell it sideways from how it's leaning. So this one's a little dicey. Anytime you're cutting a down that's dying the wood's not reliable and ash are known to split. And this one has a lean to it. So let's see how this goes. You can see some of my inexperience here. I needed to do the plunge straighter. I thought I was going pretty parallel to my initial cut but when I plunged through I actually had cut off the far side of the hinge. But that's okay you know because I didn't cut much of it. There's still like at this point there's a decent hinge. The important thing is I left plenty of hinge here to combat the lean that was going that way. If this hinge had been light it would have broken and the tree would have fallen that way. So it's the exact same procedure but rather than cutting from this side in you plunge and then cut out. And what that means is the tree is totally stable. There's no forces on the trunk trying to split it in half until the cut is complete. It's when you cut that last little bit suddenly the tree is free and the hinge operates as it should. If you come from the other side and there's a lean you might get to this point where there's still a lot of hinge left but there's enough force on the tree to actually split the trunk right there and then that causes barber chair and that's a that's something to avoid. I'd give myself maybe a c plus on this because I missed the angle of my plunge cut but close enough it did it did the job and it went where I wanted it to. So now I've got this one to do. This one is dead and it is leaning slightly that way. You want to make sure you're wearing a hard hat because when you when this tree starts moving any of those limbs up there can fall on your head. Pretty unlikely because there's no other trees for it to hit but keep that in mind. But I'm going to do the same procedure. Cut the wedge. I'm going to plunge cut in. That's going to leave the back cut intact until the last moment when I'll take that out. And I'm going to be really careful to make sure I get my plunge cut parallel to my wedge cut so that I have a nice good reliable hinge. There. Good wedge. Clean corners about a third of the way through the tree. So now I'm going to carefully plunge in here. So on this side I still got a good four inches there. Four inches there. Even a little bit more. So now I'm just going to inch up to the hinge. I'm going to leave two inches intact and then I'm going to cut back. Cut it the other way. Before I come all the way through I'm going to put a wedge in just so that the tree doesn't want to come back this way no matter what. So I must say I was surprised the tree wasn't falling. I used the wedges in the back cut and I didn't realize it when I was hitting them but you can see in the video every hit the tree would move a little bit. I'm gonna have to reach in and take out the center of that hinge again. I accomplished exactly what I was trying to do. I had a two inch nice hinge all the way across and it still wouldn't fall. I mean this ash is so strong it was holding it in spite of having it wedged. You know that's a full inch. So I had to reach in and take out the center so that there was enough weakness in the hinge to let it go. So I'm curious. Some of you guys that are more experienced with tree work than I am, apparently I'm leaving the hinge too big. What do you guys usually shoot for? I mean this tree is probably, it's 24 inches across. I would think a two inch hinge would be appropriate. Let me know what you think. Now we're going to tackle this guy. This is a pretty good sized tree and it is leaning towards my shop. So that's a common thing. How do you get the tree to go the way you want it to go? So if you really want to up your timbering game you need a few tools. Not horribly expensive but you're gonna have to put in some money. This is a rope puller and the rope that goes with it. A couple wedges, throwing ball, and some throwing line. Throwing ball is basically just a sandbag and some line that's just the right size. It's good for tying onto the rope and everything. This rope is made to go with this puller. It's basically just to come along but rather than using a cable it uses a rope so you never run out of pull. You can pull all the way to the end of the rope. So we are going to put a rope up in that tree using the throwing ball. We're going to pull it down to the base of that tree to anchor it in place and that will prevent the tree from going that way. That's going to be like that. Now to anchor to this tree I'm going to use the slack end that I'll use. I'll do a slip knot around the tree. So that's a bowline and that's a great knot because you can always untie it. Doesn't matter how hard you pull on it. Now I'm going to do a different knot. A different way to tie a bowline on a bite. And there you go. I'm just trying to get it snug. I just want to have a grip on it essentially so that it can't fall the other way. So that's fine right there. That's really not tight at all. Got hold of it so if it were to start going the other way it's going to get tight. All right now the wedge looks good. I don't have any overcuts but I went a little too far. You can see I'm more than a third of the way into that tree. I'm not half but close. But you know it still should be fine. I am within two, two and a half inches there and right there. It's a pretty wide hinge but I don't think it's too wide. Now I was paying attention to see if this was going to close up. In other words was this tree going to lean that way and pinch my blade and it did not. So I think I had just the right amount of tension on the rope. Not enough to pull it over but enough to keep it from going the other way. At this point I think I'm just going to pull it over. There's a great look at the hinge. You can see there's really not any hinge left to cut. I've got to pull it down now. That tree was making me a little nervous. It was trying to fall that way more than I was expecting and I only had one rope on it. In retrospect I think it would have been nice to have the rope higher and have two on it so that I didn't have to worry about what if my rope slips and then the tree starts going the other way because that's a bad situation. But you know I was never in any danger on this one. You take your time. You do a good wedge. You leave a good hinge. You do your back cut. You don't walk around the tree once it gets into an unstable position and you use a rope to control it. You can cut a lot of trees down that way. The nice thing about this tree is there was no other trees around for it to hit because that adds a whole other area of danger when there's something your tree's going to hit as it's falling because if it were to hit something while it's coming down it can cause that trunk to buck off of the stump and come back towards you. So I really want you guys to see barber chair because that's one of the more common ways people die cutting trees and I think if you see it and kind of understand what's going on it's going to help you to avoid it. So I've chosen some bigger trees. These are some dead ash trees out in my field. I'm going to try to make these barber chair. Yeah I guess maybe I am a dumbass. Even though these trees are bigger they're still not the size of tree that would typically barber chair. That tends to be a big tree phenomenon. I cut the first one and then pulled with the rope on the top but it just broke off normally. I tried on the second one and again I'm pulling on the top with the rope and I start to get somewhat of a split forming there. You can actually see it's pretty close. It's got a stress fracture heading up the trunk here. If it was just a bigger tree and had more weight up there it would probably do it because that is a lousy wedge with an overcut and it's not letting it fall so there's a lot of tension on this trunk. When I tried cutting just a little bit more it again broke off. On the third one I actually had some progress. A little bit of a barber chair. If the split had continued further up the trunk it would have been much more dangerous. Fortunately there's plenty of video on YouTube of barber chairs and one YouTuber allowed me to use his footage so here's that. And I'll put some links to some other videos in the description so you can see what I'm talking about. Good thing that tree fell to the left rather than towards the Oh there you go. You know I wonder why they call it a barber chair.