Thanks, Felix.

😂😂😂

Trees tremble when I walk by. Need to lose some weight.

Ditto. You are a treasure. With a pacemaker.... Please, take care of yourself!

Terry Hale At 130#, I take them by surprise.

+bigbattenberg Thanks B. Time and motion studies: give a new process to the laziest employee you've got and he will find the most efficient way to do it.

Thanks much Paddy! I am actually working on an eight part series on felling trees from an engineer's perspective. It won't have much of value for experienced fellers, but I'm hoping newbies will find it before they make some serious, but easily avoidable errors. Probably won't be able to finish the series and post it 'til April. Thanks again, Terry

Thanks, Diana! To be completely truthful, though, there was a Lot of subsequent work dismantling the extracted stump for final disposal.

@@terryhale9006 i wish you lived near me! i had trees (small ones, fir types) "removed" before i moved into my new own home last october - removal consisted of series of stumps left in front and back garden, i was stumped when i saw them, the guy merely said..."they will be lovely when the ivy grows over them" , he charged me a fortune and left them there! i was hoping to have a nice wraparound porch but no way thats happening until these stumps and roots are removed as carefully and properly as you do. i even prefer your video to those "satisfaction" videos like oozing caramel and things like that! haahaa. God Bless Your Hands,youre a great worker.

I try not to think about the changes.

Great!

Best of luck to you! Start slow and build up gradually, staying well within your limits. If you do as much as you think you can, you may end up not being able to do much of anything for a couple of weeks.

not me - not 6 hrs but bravo for you :)

Thanks for your appreciation! The dark secret is that it took even longer to dissociate the dirt and roots once the stump was extracted. The nice thing is that we now have a nice, little, rock-free flower garden there and a young apple tree, with no worry about a slowly rotting stump.

You are a machine my friend. Very impressive. Very. To bad everyone doesn’t work this hard. But at the same time you work smart.

Favorite for me, as well. LOL.

Saint D, Thanks for the views and friendly comments. As a former Geotechnical Engineer, I am well familiar with the message that soil is what you dig, while dirt is what gets under your fingernails. Does your handle reflect a Geotech background?

@@terryhale9006 Good morning, Terry! Such a pleasant surprise to find a reply; and, yes, you are spot about my handle reflecting how I feel about soils. If I had to label myself, I’d say ‘wetland soil scientist’ but find myself preoccupied by anything ‘nature’. The last eleven years were spent in upstate NY along the Southern Tier, so your videos felt that much more personal to me after learning you were rooted up there too! I’ve been clicking through your videos and thoroughly enjoying every moment, so thank you for all your efforts there! Stay well, happy, and healthy, Terry. All the best to you. -Philip

+Samuel Jay Thanks Sam.

I removed my first stump, from a dead 40-year old apple tree, when I was 9 years old. That impressed me with how much work that can be. I had to keep doing it that way until I was old enough to buy my first winch. Even after the stump is pulled over by the "holistic approach", cleaning the soil off of it is still a lot of work, but, overall, a lot less work than attacking an already cut down tree.

@@terryhale9006 Agreed. I love your other videos, you exhibit a sound thought process and execute well.

When I was eight, we moved into a house with a large dead apple tree in the front yard. I was the crazy kind of kid who got my parents permission to cut it down and remove the stump. It took nearly a month...and a thumb nail. I pretty much decided then that, if the stump needed to come out, the tree was going to help in the effort. Hope your stump is no longer bothering you!

Ha ha. Thanks.

I like oaks. Sorry to hear they have to go.

Thank you, Cindy!

Good luck to you, Trump. I definitely sense I am on the descending leg of the arc.

Yikes! Rent a D10 dozer.

+Christian Gal You can tell the tree is starting to fall when the winch, lifted off the ground due to tension in the chain, begins to drop.

Thanks. The docs tell me my heart has started to heal. I do feel better.

Terry Hale Taking this tree down shows that your heart healed!

They tell me my ejection factor has improved from 10% to 30-35%. That's still not great, but is is a noticeable and very welcome improvement.

Terry Hale. Have you talked to your doctor about electric shock treatment for your back yet ? My neighbor back surgery before and got the shots and nothing really worked. He got the electric shock treatment and he has almost no pain now. This treatment usually lasts for a year. Sometimes longer. He is very happy that he finally got it done.

fairbornCCF Thanks CC. "Patient and methodical" is what's left to you when young, strong, and energetic abandon you. "Tree over man"..he, he.

I felt incentivized. Thanks.

I'm just going to sit here for awhile and envy your age and location. Best, Terry

I have most of the illustrations for the series done, but my desired delivery date has slipped a month. I'll blame the late departure of our snow this year,

Sounds like you have a project in mind. Good luck with it!

If you've got the soil for it, great. I wouldn't want to risk mine on the rocky soil we've got.

Good call on the fiscal responsibility! "Old Dude"; First time I have been so honored, but it fits. Hope you have an enjoyable and successful set of projects and that your health stays with you a long time.

Power equipment is a definite game changer. I enjoyed using a skid-steer to take down about twenty and have taken down five with the loader on our tractor.

The carbide blades (very coarse tooth) in a mains powered recip with a small generator is a fantastic option. The AC powered versions have great power and a longer stroke length. Carbide for resilience. While they will dull some, you'll still likely have a few beater blades for odds and ends cutting later. Near hunting season I often use hand saws and a battery power sawzall in the weeks before season to lower my overall presence in the wood. Much quieter than my old arborist saw.

Thanks Carlos. Just an older video before I got tired of shaving.

Thanks. Gravity can make things move pretty quickly.

coolramone Thanks Ramone.

Understood. Not great with short stories.

It's all good.

Thank you, Je!

Sorry to hear about the wires. That pretty much means the tree will need to be taken down piece by piece, which can be pricey. I have never tried to check it out, but it might be cheaper to have the wires taken down while the tree is quickly felled, then have the wires put back up. That might be a possibility if the wire are just the service to your own house.

Thanks David. I did use a power washer to clean the dirt out from among the roots of the fallen tree. What a mess! Ended up with a pit full of soft mud and mud spatter well distributed all over me. Won't do that again. I'll resort to dragging off into the woods to rot as I have always done. Thanks again.

I'd love to pretend having great abilities, but when the chain starts to go slack, you know it's time to leave.

Thank you, Abtsam.

There are fancy ways, but I used the basic tall ladder. Frankly, the chain was quite strong and therefore quite heavy. Adding my bulk and the 70 pounds of chain probably exceeded the safe rating for the ladder.

Thanks, Karen. Glad you enjoyed.

What a nightmare! I hope you can see an end in sight.

True, but the tree spent eighty years making sure of that.

You twit...He DID show them how they should do it. How did you miss that part?

@@brokencountry283 So was I.

Thanks. ...and, absolutely, on the mechanical advantage.

Agreed. Humidity can make even mildly warm weather terrible. We are experiencing the wettest summer here in upstate New York in over 30 years and it is severely limiting the amount of outdoor work I can do. I preferred the hot, dry weather that left grains of salt on my forehead.

Thanks. I call that the "run like a bunny" phase. A bit dicey at 62, but I have to get SOME excitement in my life.

Actually, the fall can be nearly noiseless. As soon as the cable begins to allow a little slack, you know its time to leave.

Thanks, Wayne. Years ago, we lived in Alabama where we had Tulip Poplars. Fortunately for them, I never had occasion to need to pull one down. Unfortunately, that means I don't know if there is anything special about their root systems. I would not expect there to be. I would expect there to be roots similar to the red maple in the video. "Lots of rocks" is potentially scary. What I dealt with would actually be pretty tame compared to what could be possible with slabby sandstone. In what I would consider close to the worst case, you could have large thick slabs with soil in between. The slabs would make it very difficult to get at the roots. Hopefully, yours would be similar to what I encountered. Separately, if you can conveniently and SAFELY remove branches on the opposite side from where you want the tree to fall, that will help shift the weight in the direction you want it to fall, making it a little bit easier to pull down.

Thank Oz. A key issue is the roots that are directly under the stump. Because they are so difficult to get to, you want those to be pulled up, rather than having to cut them. You want to rely on leverage to do that. On a big tree, If you don't cut the roots on the side you are pulling towards, those roots will form a large lever arm to resist your pull, possibly four to seven feet from the center of the trunk. With the pivot point that far from the central roots, they will be tough to extract. On this particular semi-large tree, I cut the roots, but, even with them cut, they still placed the pivot point two and a half feet to three feet from the center of the trunk. On a smaller tree, the concerns can go to the opposite extreme. If you cut the roots all around, the pivot point may move so far in that, when you try to pull the tree over, the soil at the pivot point fails and the tree simply pivots about the "tap" roots, without necessarily pulling them up. That's not a disaster, but it does mean you have to cut those roots and it still may not be easy to get to them. For this reason, when pulling over trees with diameters of around 8 to 12 inches, I usually leave the roots on the "pull" side to act as a pivot point. On small trees, around 6" diameter, the pivot point/lever arm concept frequently won't work because the tree is so small that it just bends over in the soil when pulled. Therefore, I cut every root I can get to easily and then pull the tree over. I then sometimes keep winching to pull out all the roots that are still attached. Other times, if the pulling is tough, I'll chop the remaining roots.

Spoken like someone having a tree to deal with. Thanks!

@@terryhale9006 Indeed. I just cut down an old plum tree that had some dead growth. I am now digging out the stump. I'm not an expert by any means but careful and methodical. This method would have worked perfect!

@@ifixeditmyself1926 Sorry you missed the leverage opportunity. If you have a winch and chains, I recommend running the chain over the top of the stump and fastening it around a big root on the side away from the winch.

@@terryhale9006 Got it! That's what I will do. Thanks!

Thank you Guillermo.

Didn't mean to be rude. Back when I made that video, they were limited to 15 minutes.