Thank you, Paul!

Kind of you, Ed.

Kind of you. I'm fast approaching the age where thinking is my soul option.

Thanks Andreas. Talk is cheap. Thought is even cheaper, but it can have the best dividends of any activity.

Thanks Olli!

Thanks, Andrew. That was my motivation and remains my hope.

Thanks Karl. To quote Johnny Carson, "Never say 'dead' to an old person."

Thanks. Good to hear from you, as well.

Thanks Bill. Hope you're enjoying that work.

Thank you, Steve!

In all my years doing this, i have found you can make a tree fall pretty easy the opposite side of the lean…but getting it to fall sideways of lean is a fools errand…no matter how you broke this down and all the talk, this was 100% pure luck and all speculation. You can diagram it all you want using key terms…luck

Thanks much, Don. Very kind of you. Best to you and yours, as well.

Thanks Bernie. Three more pounds, but hanging in there.

Thanks Chas. I'll pass on your good wishes.

Thanks, Bigs.

Thanks much, Billy. Definitely enjoy seeing the animals. If you can get some tree jobs near water, you may shorten your wait to see beavers and maybe even otters. I have only seen otters once, and was delighted that they appeared briefly at our pond. Cheers!

Possibly a bit of my appreciation for fellow "civil engineers". Each year, they have to re-convince themselves that I am on their side. Finally, just last week, "Bucky" came to eat just six feet from me. Absolutely magic moments for me.

Thanks Jim. Glad to hear it.

Thanks, Dave.

Thanks Gary. I'm eager for the ice to disappear. Today's continuing snowfall has just gone past the one-foot mark, so it will probably be, at least, three more weeks.

Thanks Jay. Every once in a while, I do enjoy realizing I may have saved someone some grief.

Thanks, Justin.

Thanks, Mr. Browne. That is exactly what I am hoping to do.

@@terryhale9006 You've been helping my thinking about how to cut a problem tree and, perhaps more importantly whether it is remotely within my competence to do safely. It probably isn't, but I have a few more of your videos to watch and some more reading to do before I make that decision. Thanks so much for sharing all the thought you've put into this. A lot of people have learned how to cut trees like this safely, but what makes you able to teach it so well is your thought about the forces involved and the considerations needed to get the trees to do what you need them to do.

You are a true master in your trade Terry. I did some leaner math today. How does a180 man pull a tree over with 2000lbs of force, and 30 Tons of Torque by using a very long rope secured to the tree, and anchored to a 2nd tree? Using wedges and a 180lb pull a back leaning tree can fall in the opposite direction easily and safely. As the angle of the rope increases the force decreases however the advantage is that if the pull is continuous then the continuous force will help to ensure that the tree falls in the desired location. I doubt this scientific method is OSHA approved. Rope A needs to be much longer than the height of leaning tree for fairly obvious reasons. 🙂 I would say that this energy is more than enough to break the holding wood at the stump and bring the leaning tree into the opposite direction of the lean. Well, OK I dropped the tree in my yard before I did the math here based on the principles of physics and mathematics. But I drew up a diagram i can attach as a photo if interested as the forces at work are fantastic to see via the diagram I drew up. The advantage here is theTree Worker is away from the tree and at the other end of the rope when the hinge wood breaks. Thanks for being an inspiration to so many! My email is robermeyer524 at gma i l dot com@@monsterrodvonhugen

Glad to hear it! While it may have seemed slow to you, some of us would be delighted to be able to heal as quickly as you did. I'll hope it's a long time until the next , and sadly, inevitable injury.

Glad you're back and Ok now Human. Been watching you from here in the U.K. since the early days. 👍😃

Revealed!!! Thanks Kevin!

As a civil engineer, I studied blasting for several hydro power projects and designed a few blasts. I never attempted to get a blaster’s license, so, no video. The key for normal efficient blasting is to have the blasting agent confined so that the explosive energy is forced to act on what you want to shatter and move. For typical drill and blast operations, stemming, ideally a small gravel, is added above the explosive to prevent the gases from being wasted by shooting up the drill hole. Shaped charges work on a different principle. They are designed to have the explosive front move through the explosive so that a large amount of the energy is concentrated in a specific direction. The German panzerfausts were one of the most famous examples. When these hit Allied tanks, the explosive charge detonated from back to front and outside to inside, creating a focused jet of plasma that could vaporize a small hole through thick steel armor. In building demolition, linear shaped charges are often used against steel girder flanges and webs. It is important that the charge be placed close to the target, as the focused blast quickly becomes less focused with distance. It would be possible to design a shaped charge as a ring that could fit around a trunk, but I am not aware of such a product. Efficient tree blasting, ideally, would consist of drilling a hole or holes into the trunk and placing round charges into the hole(s). Dynamite is the classic, but Tovex and other products also come in round cylindrical form. Blasting becomes tricky when the medium being blasted is not uniform and continuous. For instance, karstic limestone can have cavities that wreak havoc with trying to get good, confined placement of the charge. If your drill hole is just a few inches from a cavity, the explosion will blow those few inches of rock into the cavity without doing much to the rest of the rock. It gets even worse if you drill through a cavity. How do you make sure the charge is staying in the hole you drilled and what effect will the cavity have on where the blast gases go? The same problems apply to tree trunks. Where is there rot? Is there a cavity? One of the worst-case scenarios for blasting is when the design and quantity were not adequate and reblasting is necessary. This is especially dangerous for trees. Initially, the tree was considered too unstable to cut down. If it is inadequately blasted and doesn’t come down, you are left with a tree that could collapse at any moment and should not even be approached. For this reason, it is reasonable to use inefficient blasting techniques on trees. That is, use sufficient overkill to ensure the tree will come down. Confining the blast should help to limit airblast that could will annoy nearby residents or shatter windows. If the blast is not placed somewhat into the trunk, it can be lumped on one side to help “toss” the trunk away from that side.

It surprised me. It fell in slow motion over the course of the subsequent half hour. I expected it to, at the least, tip to a critical distance and then fall dramatically. The root plate let it down slowly.

Thank you, sir.

Thanks Jeff.

Thanks, Doc. I absolutely love it when I interpret signs of appreciation from other species.

Keeps me happy. I seldom feel the urge to travel.

I was curious about this too. Terry Hale, I was already wondering if there's any reason that the notch on a leaning tree shouldn't be horizontal. Seeing your notch in this video makes me think there probably is.

I was initially planning on aiming it over to the left more, but changed my mind. Basically, the resulting change looks bad, as you note. Worst-looking notch I've done in a long time.

Hi Mike. I was expecting an all-or-nothing, but got surprised by a halfway. Over the next half hour, the dead leaner slowly moved down farther and farther. It did knock over the pine tree, which did fall where expected, but that, too was in slow motion. The leaning dead poplar stopped "falling" when its top got hung up, at about 40 degrees to the ground, in the large hemlocks to the right of where the desired poplar fell. The "super slo-mo" seemed surreal.

That can definitely be a problem. I frequently have it with trees of smaller diameter than that. As long as they have fought for and obtained a place in the canopy, they may be surrounded. My usual approach is to ignore the hinge until later and move up the trunk two or three feet to make a second cut. As long as you're only after firewood or simply removal, you shouldn't care about preserving the butt log as timber harvesters would. How to make that second cut is a bit of a judgment call. The greater the mass of the tree, the riskier things can be. Another consideration is whether the tree is likely to make it to the ground once the second cut gives. Another consideration is how apparent it is that the trunk wants to bend in a particular direction. If you can't tell which way the tree will want to go when your second cut is done, that should cause you to go for a very conservative approach. When I am unsure, I tie a rope around the trunk above my second cut and pull it taut, fastening to another tree so the trunk won't go towards where I will be standing to make the cut. Then I'll often use the three-cut notch and back cut to get the tree to buckle away from me. However, I usually make the back cut first. Depending on overhead hazards, I may simply push to get the hinge to fail or I may walk well around the potential fall zone to pull on the far end of the rope. Many times, even when this succeeds, the tree may simply "replant" itself with the butt up to a foot into the ground, without escaping the hang-up. Then you have to repeat the process, capturing another five feet of trunk. I have had to repeat the process as many as eight times before the top finally came down. I will confess that, on some lighter trees, particularly dead pines where I could see the bending, I have simply cut all the way through and shouldered it in the direction I want it to fall. If the weight is well supported, the tree will be less interested in buckling energetically in an unexpected direction. "Hung up" can even extend to refusal to let go of the other trees after you've removed all connection to the ground or stump. When that happens, pulling the top in a sequence of different directions will usually move it progressively down. If the weight is small, I will usually do this by hand, being carefully to keep my feet clear in the event of a sudden release. If the weight is dangerous, I use a rope to stay out of range.

Good stuff, thanks. I'll give it a go.

Good to see you back, Terry. Thanks.

I'm afraid you are correct. That would be one problem with trying to plant near them. Another would be that they have flooded up to the edge of the forest and poplar are early colonizers that don't like forest shade. Three years ago, however, I did set aside about half an acre of pasture to let the poplars grow up there. They have indeed been growing, but they need to be at least six years old before they have sufficient biomass to make it reasonable to harvest them. Poplar is widely regarded as a weed tree around here, so I have occasionally gotten people to let me harvest off of their abandoned fields. I will need to do that next year ... if the beavers stick around.

Thanks Richard. Heart is still working. (Yay!)

It really won't matter.

Thanks for the insights and videos! They were very helpful

The only thing special about that notch cut was that it was made by a tired old man who was racing against sunset. I started the bottom part of the notch cut with the idea of aiming to miss the hemlock and birch on the right, but changed my mind, as missing those would have put the top down into the pit. I stopped the bottom of the cut early, hence the inclined hinge. Don't look for cleverness, just accept it as exhaustion and sloppiness. The hinge was 3" thick on the left and about 1.25" on the right. The dead leaner did fall another 15 degrees before getting hung up in the birch on the other side of the trail. When it did, it knocked the small white pine across the rejected escape path. That day, I got two pickup truckloads to the beavers. When I checked the next day, they had collected EVERY SINGLE twig I delivered. Worrisome thoroughness. I tried to deliver a heaping truckload this last Sunday, but, in one week, the ice had gone from window pane to six inches thick. I left the branches on top of the ice. They have not been able to get to them yet.

hey, thanks for the reply… don't be hard on yourself for being tired, you work hard just felling trees w/o getting knocked on the head, to say nothing of filming, editing n posting these videos. i already forgot that this started as getting supplies for the beavers, i'm sure they appreciate it n hope they're doing well. as they are "nature's engineers" i'm certain that if there was more supplies than they needed, they just figured, "well, i know i'll find a use of it someday." you have 6" of lake ice and i thought you were in georgia but maybe i'm mixing up your channel with another. so the tapered hinge draws the fall towards the thick end? i watched another guy [logger wade?] use a "triple hinge" to draw away from a lean. last question for now, thanks again for your time, about the height of the back cut - on straight vertical trees, nothing problematic; i've seen mostly coming in from the back, a couple of inches above the level of the base of the (45º) notch. but then i saw a swede specifically disparage that in favor of a plunge level w the bottom of a 70º notch and proceeding to cut out through back trigger. your thoughts?

I had the hinge wide on the left because I was unsure of just how large the forces were that were pushing it to the right. I wanted to make sure it didn't fail, in any direction, until I cut the trigger. Hinges start to fail in tension from the back. Assuming the thick part is on the side away from the lean, the tension will be highest where the hinge is thickest. Therefore, the hinge will thin fastest where it is thickest. In my experience, the direction of fall will be perpendicular to the axis of the notch, pretty much independent of variations in thickness of the hinge. If your tree has a free path for its fall, the step for the hinge is not too important. However, if it might contact another tree on its way down, that step can be critical to preventing kick back. That problem is illustrated in a borrowed clip contained in one of my other videos. See kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nNaRftKdqr3cd2g.html As to 70 degrees, I consider that unnecessarily generous, especially for firewood gathering. My preference is also to cut out through the back trigger. One really trivial reason is that I don't like extra steps on the wood when I get to splitting it.

thanks again.

Hi, Bill. Not sure if you are asking why the notch needs to be shallow or whether you are asking why a notch is needed at all. As to "Why did the tree fall at all?", there are two probable factors. First, in this case, there was a tree leaning against it, pushing it in somewhat the right direction. Second, and much more generally, if a tree is relatively well balanced, cutting a notch out of it will deprive that side of support, inducing a subtle bit of lean. For a well balanced tree, that little bit of an earlier suggestion may be all the tree needs to decide where to go.

@@terryhale9006 I didn't realize a leaner was making it fall. I'm guessing the shallow notch slowed down the fall giving you more time to escape. In my limited experience, cutting down what appears to be a straight tree with the center of gravity seemingly in the center of the trunk, it takes a wedge or two to get it to fall. With my standard 20-25% face cut, it would seem that the tree will just sit on the hinge and a wedge or trigger until heck freezes over until the wedges shift the center of gravity toward the hinge, and then she goes. Otherwise there is no reason for it to tip over(?). [I did fairly well in statics class but got progressively worse in dynamics and mechanics of materials. I had no clue in kinematics class. But I went to a tough school!]. I guess I've been guessing correctly so far as I'm still alive but way too old to be whacking trees, but I do it anyway. :) But i pull most of them over just to be sure.

Largely, but not completely. They gratefully accepted the first 2/3. Unfortunately, we got an early cold snap and the pond froze over. Regardless, I delivered the remaining third, but it stayed on top of the ice until Spring.

Not sure. Poplar has a cambium that seems to have some chlorophyll associated with it. Many other barks have chemicals designed to dissuade eaters.

I have to admit I was surprised myself. I don't think of poplars getting to 100 feet.

True. I am glad I have an area where their activities won't bother anyone. In their defense, the series of ponds they have created has attracted all sorts of wildlife that I would otherwise not have the opportunity to enjoy: Kingfishers, Great Blue Heron, Green Heron, Numerous kinds of ducks, geese, turtles, muskrats, fish, otter, deer, etc.

Damage? For whose use? Some critters might not appreciate their dams, but for others, the dams make the creeks useful. They also probably slightly even out water flow rates and lessen flooding. "Slightly" being an important word there.