Side Cuts: A Really Good Habit!

[Music] hey what's up climber nation Patrick here so today we're taking a look at side cuts or curved cuts or winged cuts or whatever you want to call them we're gonna look at what this concept is and why we use it and when and why it's important all right I'm just going to pause it there so the basic idea of the side cut is that after you have made your face cut but before you make your back cut you just want to scribe a couple of shallow cuts on either side of the stem directly below where your hinge wood is going to be right so these cuts need to go through the bark and just into the cambium or the SAP wood that's the basic concept okay [Applause] it's a nice black walnut alright so here's another look at a different one so the basic reason why you want to make your side cuts is there's lots of factors that go into this but basically on certain in certain situations as a top comes over once the face closes the the sapwood or the bark on either side of the hinge can actually hold on longer than it should and it can tear downwards and and that tearing and holding on can be enough to change the direction of a top as it comes over it can naturally actually end up going in a different direction than you intended okay so that's why these side cuts are so important and this is a fairly unpredictable thing there's lots of factors that go into it a major one is species so this example here you see is a black walnut around this area at least in my experience black walnut is is really prone to this tearing that I'm talking about soft woods are also very prone like spruce trees are pretty prone to this kind of tearing that the time of year can be a factor so you know in the springtime like depending on where you live in the springtime or the fall when the SAP is running up and down on the other layers of the cambium that can can play a role and whether or not a top wood would pull hard to one side also whether the tree is alive or dead I mean a dead tree is far less likely for this to be an issue than a live tree ok so there's lots of factors that go into this this is just what I would consider a really good habit to be in or best practice ok so here's a big sugar maple top you can see I make my face cut we make my side cuts and then my background right so here's a more typical size top around these these parts this is a Manitoba maple or a box elder so I make my face cut couple of shallow side cuts and then back alright and then get showered with dead branches alright so I know I don't only use it for topping I also use it for felling especially with softwood trees so here's a white pine I need the aim to be exact I don't want to take the branches off of any of the other trees on either side of it so face cut side cuts back alright so hopefully that makes sense so far like glove alright so we've looked at a few examples where I made my side cuts now let's look at an example where I did not okay so this is a spruce tree this is the last top on the Spurs I'm in the bucket truck I want to just freefall this top directly into the front yard and have it land flat okay but for whatever reason I didn't make my side cuts right [Music] ooh brutal slow motion Wow so you can see once the face closes it pulls hard to the left right left that could have been so much worse it's gonna pause it there so you can see in my left hand I'm holding this little strip of sapwood okay so again once the face closes on a on the top the only thing that's guiding it at that point is gravity right but in this case you also had this little strip of sapwood that was holding it and you can see it starts to come over it gets about 45 degrees and then it pulls hard to the left okay and this does two things right number one it pulls the top in a direction that I didn't want it to go so it changes the aim but number two it also causes it to hold on to the to the stump much longer than it should have which causes it to land on the tips and then allows the butt-end to just spring back in an unpredictable direction okay so it's just a bad deal all around right so again I want to make sure that that you guys understand I'm not suggesting that if you don't make a side cuts make your side cuz that something bad is going to happen when you're taking the top I'm not saying that I'm just saying this is a really good habit to get into okay that wasn't a dutchman that was Burke I didn't do the side cut it was going here and then it ended up over here Oh brutal brutal so again that could have been so much worse anyway hopefully this makes sense to you guys hopefully you can get some value out of this and you know again just try and get in the habit of making your side cuts it's highly recommended all right so listen while I have you guys here why don't we just go ahead and watch another one we could watch this one or this one hmmm let's just do it do it listen I really appreciate you guys watching educating climate videos this is just a bit amazing so thank you guys so much [Music]

Channel: EducatedClimber

Views: 17,347

Rating: 4.9811096 out of 5

Keywords: arborist, treesurgeon, gopro, educatedclimber, educated, climber, educatedclimber.com, tree, work, climbing, chainsaw, rope, knots, ropes, knot, trees, arb, rigging, surgeon, roping, kerf, kerf cuts, wing cuts, side cuts, topping, taking tops, taking a top, cutting a top, stihl, husqvarna, dropping tops, arb skills

Id: ahsiwjIWkQk

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 26 2020