- So you wanna remove a stump, but you don't wanna hire a stump grinder or heavy machinery to get it out? Or perhaps you just wanna test yourself, man versus stump and see if you have what it
takes to pull a stump by hand? Well, this is the video for you. Good day, I'm Mark from
"Self-Sufficient Me", and in this video I'm gonna
show you how to remove a stump by hand using the
wedge, or wedges system. Let's get into it. (gentle music) (bee buzzing)
(birds chirping) If you've been following me for a while, you'd know that I successfully
grew a dragon fruit vine in a container right in this spot here, on the stump that I have now removed. But I'm in the process of
concreting this area behind our shed so it can be used as a nursery, and the stump had to go. The first thing I did was cut
the stump off at ground level, the closer you can go to the
ground, probably the better. The next thing to do is
dig out around the stump, and you're doing two things,
you're clearing the area, plus you're looking for where
the main root system is. Most stumps have a base-secure
root system with four or five main roots coming out
from the base of the tree, and what they do is
stabilize the tree in place. Find those stabilizing
roots and dig around them as much as you can to open the area up so that you know what you're working with. You wanna also dig out a
bit so that you've got room to work with your chainsaw, the less you're cutting
into soil and gravel, the better it is for your
chainsaw chain and the bar, because the next step is to cut through those main base roots
so that all you're left with, hopefully, is a stump with
probably a major tap root going straight down. Next is the cross cut,
cut a cross in the top of the stump all the
way through to the base, and hopefully right down to
where the tap root starts on the base of the stump. This will make four quarters. Now this is a fair job, and it's why I said at the beginning, you wanna cut as much of that stump to the ground as possible, because you basically have to make a plunge cut or a side
cut, whichever way you go, to get that cross cut and of course, make sure you think safety
when you're doing this because it is a risky job. Once you've got that
quarter cross cut done, now's the time to make your wedges. I just used scrap, but
good quality hard wood, that was left over from
our deck renovation. You'll probably use quite a few pieces, so fill your boots by
cutting as many as you like, maybe even 10, and also different sizes, thicker, smaller, to
accommodate for widening out those gaps as you hammer the wedges in. And then with a nice sized sledgehammer, drive the wedge into the cut
between two of the quarters and keep using bigger
wedges to increase the gap until one or both quarters
of the stump give way. Once you've cracked the quarter and you felt that it's given way, you can then do the
rest by using a crowbar, and in my case, I used a
prong tool to lever it out. It might take a little bit
to lever the broken piece out because you've still got soil and what not kind of cemented in for
a long time around it, so if you do have to dig
out a little bit more, fine, but if you've done
the digging appropriately in the first place, it
should just come right out once it's snapped off that tap root. And then it's just a matter of repeating the wedge process for
all the other quarters. If you find the last
quarter is still stuck solid in place, you might have
to split it further in half since there's nothing to
wedge it again, obviously, and I had to do that in this case. I just split it one last time
with a cut down the middle, and that was easy enough to jam the prong down and break it in half, and then a sledge hammer finished it off. After that you can fill in
the whole and the job's done, but in this case, because
I'm concreting this area, I just filled it a little bit and that's gonna be dug out anyway, but at least there won't
be any problems trying to deal with a stump in the
way when laying the slab. Just a few last points to make, this process works best with older stumps, in newly cut down trees the stump might be harder to wedge out due to the extra flexibility and the fresh wood, and it will be harder to break or snap the stump off from the tap root. Some tress have easier
root systems than others and the size of the
tree makes a difference. Naturally, the bigger the
stump, the longer and harder it's probably gonna be to get out, you're just gonna have to use more wedges. And the other thing about wedges, you can use the steel ones. Now, I'm no professional tree
lopper or stump remover guy, so I just cut these because
it was handy for me, but you can get professional steel wedges that the loggers use and that, and they would obviously
do a much better job, so you might wanna consider buying them, but for me, just cutting
my own was good enough. Always wear eye protection, perhaps even a full face protection in case the wedge springs out
and hits you in the mouth, I mean you don't wanna lose
your front teeth, do you? Trying to get a stump out,
that'll be pretty awful, I probably should have taken
my own advice with that. And finally, be happy to
do an upper body workout because that's what you're gonna get, it's no easy thing. This took me over an
hour to get out myself, and it wasn't an easy process, but at least I didn't
have to use anything else except for brute force and my own hands. Having said that, this
wedge system of removing a stump makes it easier
than trying to chop it out, but yeah, you'll still
feel it the next day. I hope this video helps
you if you're trying to remove a stump by hand, or
at least give you some ideas on how to do it and then
you find your own way. If it does, make sure you stump up and give it a big thumbs up, subscribe if you haven't already and share this video around
because that helps a lot. Thanks a lot for watching, bye for now. Good luck. It's hard yakka, but
hey, it's well worth it. And this stuff, it will go in the base of some of our garden beds,
it'll be used as firewood. Hey, ha, just about done that too. Maybe I could been a karate expert, lethal hands. (loud bang) (loud bang) (loud bang) (birds chirping)
