Why an angled back cut is dangerous and unecessary when hinge cutting a tree

every chainsaw manual teaches how to safely cut a tree and every single manual teaches making a horizontal back cut the steel manual says cut horizontally the Husqvarna manual says the felling cut must be perfectly horizontal so why do so many people ignore the advice of experts and make an angle back cut jeff Jepson author of the book - fell a tree which is known by many loggers an arborist as the tree fellers bible explains you may have noticed stumps with an angled back cut this is a dangerous practice which you will never see promoted as an acceptable method of felling trees as it greatly reduces the effectiveness of the hinge osha restricts its use they are usually made by uninformed beginning tree cutters who believe the angle cut will help prevent the tree from falling backwards off the stump but what are the underlying mechanical reasons let's take a look so just imagine this tree is you know 10 or 12 inches in diameter then what I'm going to do is an angle cut and I'm going to go about as far as we normally would when we hens cut so the idea is you want this tree to go in this direction but if it's a bigger tree it may fall back on you and you can put a wedge back in here with a bigger tree now I've cut through far enough that I could pull that tree down right now pretty close to it gonna go just a little further and take a picture of how far through my saw is on this and now I'm gonna do a flat cut under it and I'm gonna make this flat cut a lot further through than I did the other cut so it is completely ready to release and we're gonna see which one of these break off you imagine this is a big tree and what's happening here is this tree is completely released on here there's just a little bit of wood holding it there's a lot more wood holding it up here so why is it that it takes so many more cuts to do an angle cut than it does to do a flat cut well first when you do an angle cut you're cutting down along the grain of the wood you're not just cutting across the wood if you do a flat cut you're doing a crosscut it turns out that both a handsaw and a chainsaw are more efficient at cutting across the grain than they are cutting with the grain since you're personally cutting with the grain it actually takes more work for the saw to chew when you're doing an angle cut the other thing has to do with the distance you're cutting let's say you have a four inch diameter tree if you want to cut three-quarters of the way through that tree it takes three inches of cutting to do a flat cut but if you do an angle cut at a 45 degree angle that's 4.2 inches that may not seem like much but if you were to do a hundred of these four inch trees you're cutting a whopping extra 10 feet of wood to do those hundred trees that's a lot of work it's a lot of wear and tear in the equipment and it's a lot of wear and tear on your body and you're doing all that extra work in order to make a more unstable hinge it gay first up here on the top the bottom one didn't even give why is that because here I was pulling on a lever that's angled down like this and it broke that apart across the green this is my holding wood right here it was almost a third of the tree here's my holding wood on the other side look at the difference in the amount of holding wood there which one broke the angle cut the angle cut will always be weaker and break first that didn't go as planned it might have been more accurate to say it didn't go as expected it was a perfect plan if you wanted to make the hinge fail and cause the tree to fall the wrong way just cut too far through with the face cut and then do an angle back cut causing it to break and slide forward off the stump here's another perfectly executed plan a steep angled back cut causes the tree to slide forward off the stump and then fall backwards like the previous example having a rope to pull on did not help to prevent the tree from falling backwards but instead it helped apply more pressure on the already weakened hinge the mechanics are exactly the same for hinge cutting is for conventional cutting if the tree leans back it will apply pressure across the grain instead of along the grain breaking the hinge and causing the tree to fall backwards after it slides off the stump [Music] you

Channel: Extreme Deer Habitat

Views: 971,234

Rating: 4.3881392 out of 5

Keywords: hinge cut, tree felling, tree cutting, cut a tree, deer habitat, hinge cut for deer habitat, chainsaw safety, how to cut a tree, Deer (Organism Classification), Silky Zubat

Id: i2ejmMVF2SM

Length: 5min 39sec (339 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 18 2014