Barber Chair Oak Removal; How'd I Do?
I do maintenance for our neighbors, and recently an enormous old oak came down. Easily a century old and dead for 10+ years, the roots rotted out and the inevitable occurred. On the way, it took out a little 8 incher nearby, but not all the way. Enough to bend it at a 90 degree angle and load it up pretty good. It's not the best pic, but you can see it arching over the top of the big guy in the first picture, and the already broken pieces sticking up.
I sawed through the horizontal portion first, with a long ass Temu pole saw (there's a link to that video at the bottom). I figured it was best to have less weight trying to kill me when I did finally have to drop it. Around 1:30 you can hear me say "You fuckin' undercut it then" because I'm getting cheesed off about my saw pinching in the cut, and the voice in my head was saying "If you had undercut it, it wouldn't pinch so much" . Hopefully I'm not the only one that gets in mental arguments with themselves.
The second pic is an ugly face cut I made with the saw as far away from my body as was safe, and the last pic is what it looked like after it was cut through. You can see the fracture lines where it was splitting up the length of the trunk. I made my final back cut with a bow saw, going slow so that I cut the triggers one by one, releasing the tension a little at a time. Stuff can still go wrong with a bow saw, but it goes wrong a lot more slowly.
Anyway, it's down, I'm not dead, and I just have to clean up the rest of the pieces tomorrow.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eLhH_XYhTunu69-80WAFp0EiqGtySOWW/view
