Monday, July 25, 2011

Leaning Tower of Maple

That backyard maple with the split down the trunk to ground is worrisome. The split is wider and the one side is leaning and diseased.

My brother had a tree guy come look at it, but his price was really high, to just cut of the six bigger branches that then branch out themselves, way up there, at the top of the cat wire. We couldn't afford it. Six quick chainsaw cuts then cutting up and hauling off the debris. The trunk can stand there split like it is up ten feet. No problemo without the heavy branches pulling it apart until it falls.

Course the branches have to be tied off first, to fall right.

Then my brother was going to come up and do it, but he thought it would be a massive amount of labor, especially cutting up the branches and hauling them off even though he wanted the decent diameter wood to burn in his stove at home. He's also very busy. So he never made it up.

So his daughter came up. She's an adult and very tough. But she didn't like the look of the tree and thought it might be dangerous to do without any real equipment, so we went and took a walk and had lunch while she was here and that made me happy.

So it's up to me now. I've the sawzall and have cut some of the branches using that. But even on the small diameter ones, the sawzall heats up badly and can only cut through half before over heating. On bigger diameter branches cutting half through one drains the battery. Then I'm left to saw at it with a handsaw. Which means, I need to start early in the day.

I've used the hanging cinder block method to make the branches fall where I want. I use the extendable handle pruner, like an old person's picker upper, to clutch cable rope and wrap it around the branch I want to secure. I loop it through, in a hitch, then run the cable rope whatever angle is needed out over the better half of the tree and hang one or two cinder blocks from it, a measured distance from the ground to pull the bottom down one way and the top the other way. Has worked very excellently.

This weekend, I got to get at that. That tree looks bad and if one side splits off, it will take out my cat yard fence, at the least, and if one of the other branches goes, with all its off branches, it will damage my roof and maybe the neighbors roof.

I tried to call in a couple favors, with people who have chainsaws and experience with this sort of thing, but I did not receive call backs.

So it boils down to me and my sawzall and I better be good at wrangling those heavy maple branches down like I want them, so I don't get hurt and nothing else does either. I'll wear boots this time, proper eye wear, my bicycle helmet and even gloves. It's all in the physics of planning, to make it come down exactly as I want it to, with the hanging cinder blocks, but it is hard to estimate the weight correctly.

This weekend is the big date to take out one of the bigger branches on the bad side. Wish me luck.

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