WORLD'S BEST TREE FELLING TUTORIAL! Way more information than you ever wanted on how to fell a tree!

this is gonna be a fun job we've got inbred Jed Chad and over here so these folks are gonna be building a shop right here so all these nice furs coming down we'll be able to will be able to fall everything here so hopefully you'll be able to do a nice video showing all the fundamentals of tree felling the various types of notches try to be educational and fun so I want to be really thorough so check it out this is a diameter tape I'm gonna get the diameter at breast height DBH they call it of every tree and then this is a forestry laser so I'll be shooting the height of all the trees so I'll put that in so you know exactly how big these trees are and so you know I'm not just guessing on my numbers so this first tree is a hundred and forty five feet tall yeah it's a tall one is 31 inches in diameter [Music] [Music] all right thanks Jed all right tree number one coming up so we're gonna leave tall stumps cuz they're gonna rip these over with excavator they want something to grab usually you know I would want to cut it lower the lower the better I'm gonna do a Humboldt notch I'll explain that in a minute [Music] yeah let's see this line these are your filling sites right here you just look straight down and you know the tree will just be just a hair to the right of this line but that's a good indication I got that big huge open field so I'm a little over a third of the way deep I'll start my back cut parallel but not put some wedges in as I go be that personal and this is why you want to saw with the full wrap handle because if I didn't have this fluoride handle I'd have to muscle it like this which is totally lame or edit to stand on the other side so except the full wrap handle I can stand on the side comfortably [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] another thing you can do is you take your wedge and you just barely stick it in there and if the tree starts to sit back you'll see this wedge lift up and if the tree starts to go the right way hopefully the wedge will just the wedge will just fall out so if you just put it barely in there I'm going to tap it in just to be safe but that close to the end on this side I'm gonna go to the other side cuz my bar is short and get that I don't want to just keep cutting through and I'll go through my face cut [Music] now this side done I'm really close to the face I'm gonna come back here cuz I want to be uphill from this thing when it goes so now I'm gonna finish it off [Music] cool nice [Music] so see this is what they call holding wood or hinge wood you see it's bent because as the tree goes over this is what holds on and controls the momentum of the tree you want to bring the cup over here Jed just explain this a little bit so you can see my borrow is short right here which is why I walked over to the other side if I see it when I say if I just would have kept going I wouldn't ended up cutting through the front of my face cut leaving this on which would have been no good you want about 10% is the rule of thumb across your hinge wood right here what else but yeah this is what controls of the tree and the most important thing by far when you're following a tree is you don't want to cut this part of the tree the hinge because say I sever this off complete well as soon as the hinge is severed the tree just goes wherever gravity's taking it and so you can kind of steer it - as it goes like if you leave more hinge on this side this side will hold more which will steer the tree a little bit you know that way and vice versa so this worked out this is called a humble which is useful for both the application of it makes the but more likely to hit the ground first so it's more likely to hit the ground the but first rather than digging the tip into the ground and also it makes the but square if I did a conventional knotch that would eat it and that was the first tree now Kjetil do the second one it's a nice piece of wood there's no root rot anywhere in here it's just like a piece of furniture anything else you want to add about the Humboldt does good explanation [Applause] Jed's gonna do this one tree number two this one is a hundred and fifty feet tall since 26 inches in diameter I want to try to cut a gap space in this fur which is I think what the whole time timber cutters used to get really big trees over in my understanding was because the compression has to go somewhere as that tree leaves this way all the compression is stacking up on the front part of the hinge and I was told you'd save out more hinge wood if you stacked that compression over a greater area of wood fiber before the bottom of the technically technically scarf I guess no snipe there's two different openings and snipe would be from the bottom so you knock out a gap snipe the bottom that's the idea [Music] [Applause] [Music] me yeah you should always clean all the Sartre station all the little Dutchman out which I've got just to hear a bit of Dutchman in there I'm probably not gonna worry about it and just snipe this really open so that if this side hits first and it's not going to that's a ton of travel right there but when you have really clear green like that you don't have to bang your guts out even a mondo gap like that will pop right out and that's really the best face I think that you can have all right it says the gap cut yeah and I'll just all this open this up a little bit more on that site just because we can we got [Music] that's your best directional face the downside is it takes a little bit longer so we usually don't use it we usually just try to match our cuts bang it out that's good enough for most of the shots that we need this gives you maximum travel but it's gonna hit the ground harder it's gonna bust more wood it's going to drive more limbs into the ground not much but that's a gentle or humble we'll shoot it out a little bit softer but this will give you the most control most directional control if you had a real critical shot I would do that every time [Music] what's interesting to me is most of the limb wave was away from the house we're on that side so that would be that the compression side of the hinge also this is in compression as the tree goes over this fiber stretching and this is scrunching up really tight and so I was taught that that distributes the compression over a greater amount of wood fiber which is preferable and not this this would indicate that so this actually cold wood as it left its stacked up and then as it finally hit the ground and ripped away it actually took some of this on the tension side and it's interesting to me that it did it pull any of that wood on the compression side so that gives the law of the greatest amount of travel directional control the closing of the face is not constituting an impediment to the holding power of the holding wood once the face closes you're breaking off all your holding power and how deep do you want to go when you're cutting a face cut I stick to 1/3 you know this is a head leader it leaned at the shot you know said no bangin wedges just letting it go pretty much get in a wedge for security just in case if it's windy it's not I stick to 1/3 there's a million reasons why Pro cutters would want to go farther back you see a lot of Pro redwood fathers no cutting at least 50% but for me I want room for my wedges in my guide bar I don't want a tap tap cut cut tap tap that's really annoying you bang out your chisels on your saw and and you goof your wedges up and it's no fun all right cool so that was the gap cut so I guess this guy's next tree number 3 number three this one is a hundred and forty nine feet tall 29 inches in diameter at chest height I'm gonna do a conventional base cut commercial notch this is the most common [Music] the benefit to this for a lot of people this is the easiest to see gravity the weight of the saw it's easy to push it through especially if your song goal that's a good way to do it a lot of times I'll do a conventional and I want to get as low as she's been be possible because that will give me the most wood to work with so I'll do a conventional because you can get it lower then if you cut a humble you gotta be a little bit taller of the stop so if I want to get as low to the ground as possible imma cut I'll do a conventional main benefit of the conventional notch reason most people to cut it down just mine for you know a me way to go a third of the way in and didn't need any wedges or anything I'm doing this I like to you know figure my depth I like to dog in at a third and that way I can just rotate the tip of my bar I don't want to be jiggling my saw a whole bunch but I do this because then I'll have inconsistent wood in the center will be harder for me to speculate what exactly my wood looks like you might the cut just dog it in where you want it and then Road [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] [Music] so another thing so so my my face cut is done is to conventional base cut or conventional knotch and see how my corners meet up say I cut in and I had like a kerf here and the face Scott went here well that would be called a Dutchman and which is super dangerous because well what's that little gap closes the hinge is likely to break and for all sorts of reasons a Dutchman is dangerous and bad you want to make sure that your corners match up it's a really common mistake sometimes people make their cut and they go that's good enough but it's deceptive because you're not really aiming where you think you are if you've got that Dutchman in there you have to clean that up so say I cut my first cut here and then I'm going down if my bar is going past it if that makes sense that is worked so I can cut it and I could end up here or I could cut it and I could end up further back and better yeah it's better if I end up here because that's cutting it short rather than long so if I cut it here I can always bring my saw up and I can take more off but if you go too far that way now your directional cut is completely it's right at the house yeah it's aimed at different directions so always keep in mind it's better to be short than laws when you're trying to cut this because you can always keep adjusting it but eventually you do want it to look like this where your corners match up with one another it's a nice face thanks man [Laughter] all right now I have a whole bottle whole thing was left I don't want to keep cutting so I'm just gonna do wedges now if I cut through my face cut who knows where it'll go [Music] starting to go [Music] [Music] worked out pretty well got tickets shot thanks man yeah pretty rot so I'll show you one of the disadvantages to this the the conventional so if you remember these first two trees I did a humble and then he did his gap cut and both of these the logs landed and saved out pretty nice and then remember I did this so so the conventional as this closes it jumps up and the tip hits the ground first and then the but whereas both of these cuts when this breaks the butt will hit the ground first which will put the most of the impact of the tree on the thickest part the wood needs so you remember we we followed those two the logs turned out pretty nice and then I just did this conventional one right - brakes three breaks so I broke my log in three spots also it makes it worse that my stump is high if it were lower the lower the stump the softer it's gonna land because you have all this travel room right here to gain momentum and energy but like I said they gotta try to wiggle this nut with the excavator so they need something to grab which is why we're leaving tall stumps on these whereas otherwise we would normally want to do low stumps on these while we follow the trees all right this is tree number 4 26 inches in diameter and 140 feet tall [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] the bore cut or the plunge cut and the purpose of this this is it useful not to know because the purpose sort you probably have heard of barber cheering you know as a tree falls over too much pressure on a tree you know probably leaning the right way can cause the wood to fracture and split and this is something to really worry about especially with like weaker wooded softer trees like COD wood and Aldrin stuff this is Douglas fir it's really not likely to barber chair to actually get this tree to barber chair ID dip like put a monster-truck on it and pull while I cut what's really solid but it wouldn't be the world's best tree felling video we didn't talk about all the cuts we can think of so this is the bore cut and what this does is I'm gonna plunge in I'm gonna get my hinge would set and then I'm gonna cut straight back and what that will do is it'll allow the tree to hold on the fibers on the back will hold the tree in place for as long as possible that way when I separate the whole thing will fall over without a barber chairing the reason I don't do it that often is because as you're making your back cut you know once the tree starts to go over it starts to tip over slowly and you can watch it from the back and you can you know kind of guide it you know if you cut more wood on this side the trees going to steer a little more this way couple more on this side that she's going to stay a little that way as long as you don't cut through you're holding wood you have a little bit of control as it goes down no with the bore cut well it's true that you mitigate the you know the potential problem of the barber chair you don't have as much control because once you get it set and you cut it back it just pops it goes right where you're aimed at so that's why it's not a very popular cut I'll be Stover here but I'm gonna do it and you're gonna see how the board gets done it leans pretty well in the direction that I want it and so you got to think if the tree is leaning heavy you know there's a lot of pressure on that stem when you stick your saw in the back of it you know that too much force can cause you know can cause it to barber chair which can make for a really dangerous situation I'm gonna plunge in and I'm gonna try to do it right here and leave in my get it cut to about 10 percent holding wood and then [Music] most guys cut up 2/3 inch and then we got out perfect that one it's okay so this back strap will hold a lot of weight and the theory behind this is that all of the weight will be released at once instead of incrementally which might cause the potential for you know fracturing a barber chair and stuff like that so I'll just zip right through it this thing should just fall where where it's cut up to that'll be good all right so that was the bore cut and it works pretty well yeah one caveat on that you can you can bore in a little bit behind where Jake was like come into a real safe spot in here and you still have plenty of back strap the tree is never gonna go anywhere no matter how heavily it's leaning with about four inches of wood on the sapwood you can bore in and then work your way up really carefully take your time on the far side you know it's I don't use it yeah and it's worth noting so the wood back here so this would be tension wood and this is compression wood so you can imagine the wood holding here it's like a guy wire and this over here is like a prop a little bit of wood here is way way stronger than a little bit of wood right here so a little bit could hold a lot right here this one is a hundred and thirty nine feet tall 22 inches in diameter well kind of significant cycling to the house if I hold this string right in the middle of the stuff I can see that it clears the string about two feet towards the house if I get that yeah I don't know although Tom means to the house outta Center from the militants stomped there so there's a trick that I learned called the siz well which holds a lot more tension than an ordinary cut wood so I'm going to try to show that cut and then also try to swing the tree off offices well event so that would be an angled cut this way and it tends to swing the tree like a door cool yeah [Music] [Music] I cut a bit of a dutchman there on my first cut it's because I wanted to miss on the Dutchman side you do not want a gap on your compression side because the tree can fail in torsion you want a pinch here you actually want to stack up compression here and not let the compression this is why you don't do a full gapped phase so what we have is like a modified gaps face this part has a gap and if I want I'll take and skank this little corner off here and that'll actually save that says well out a bit better this parts gonna close first and this is gonna hold like nobody's business you can see the fiber pole wants the trees down it holds the world if this were leaning any hard than any harder than this we'd have to put a rope in there and tie it 90 degrees over there to hold the side lean it's just a nice trick when you're by the house this is kind of borderline for me I wouldn't really try to swing it any more side lien than that [Music] [Music] so there's all the side liens stacked up and you can see we pulled fibre down to the bottom of my cut there so instead of your tension just being all wrapped up on this one little bit of holding would you've effectually spread it over a greater amount of wood fire it makes almost like a cable on your tension side I love this trick it can be overrated if you try to get away with murder but here and there it's it's really nice to use and you saw is the tree pulled sideways it even twisted a little bit enrolled so it even rolled like that a little bit that held on real well dead nice job man coming up tree number five I'm pretty simple stuff and Latrobe all so I'm gonna take this set a rope I don't need to set it I don't even set it crazy hi I'm just gonna about 35 feet we'll have loads of leverage the skin take my rigging line carabiner offs I don't want that to get stuck [Music] [Music] just fine my throw ball out [Music] I'm just gonna grab this winch light is it and Free Spin I'm gonna come over here show you really handy not this is a bowline on a bite so check this out just do a bite a rope how was it like that I haven't measured it so you just do a bite like that bring it up like this see that stick the Rope through here go around this whole thing pull that tight and that's a bowline on a Bight really useful it can put a lot of weight on it it'll come it'll come right off when I'm done with this I'm just gonna clip this guy here go ahead over pull out tie it we don't need a ton of pull this thing doesn't really lean back that hard so we're just going to Snug it up yeah it feels good man just taught you pull something over with uh with a rope you don't want to put a whole bunch of pressure on it right away you just kind of want to hold the tree in place while you're getting cut up if you put too much force on it you can prematurely break the piece you know off of the stump so we're just gonna get it snug chad is gonna do this one and once it's cut up he's about at 10% on this hinge wood then we'll just have Dover pull it right over this should go pretty well so Chad's gonna yeah you're gonna stretch that trio Chad there yeah you got a weird cat face here we should explain we're holding these stumps really high for the hole that they're gonna pull these out with a backhoe so ordinarily we would come down a lot lower stay on the tree like that it just gives you more room for wedges even though there's some flare in there the grain is not quite as straight a bit of a cat face here it's nothing to be concerned about and then he's gonna cut it up here anyway Chad what do you think right in there boy so yeah we got a rope honor it may go just off a little wedge bang so see how this works out [Music] [Music] nice not printed anymore nice job man dad usually works on the prudent crew he's pretty good at brooding I have to take him off the pruning crew he's arborist and stuff proving bigger ones now yeah it's turning this one / this is nice don't know Jed was the diameter on this 23 one inch bigger than the one I done so it's probably taller too so I measured it it's 148 whoa but Dover's at a nice safe 149 oh well he's just over any wasted overs good yeah he's saying I hate you all right so 23 yeah just get it snug [Music] [Music] around and look at it yup the other side yep you know just to make sure you're plenty right now you're really looking good here but you know you might take two more inches okay you might bang it up and real tight but trying to do it the all natural right [Music] nice shot well John I fun stuff hey look at your lips that's nice I'm just a prune or so oh my gosh nice job Dover so remember my bowling on a bike I got you see this is to get undone that bada-bing bada-boom knob buddy dad right all right so we got two trees left we just got these two guys right here they both leaned back pretty hard I'll demonstrate an open-face and Jed's gonna do a back cut first on this one tricky one I'll just have a Dover here push this over for me let me show you what a bad notch looks like real quick [Music] yeah okay so so this is an example this is a bad face cut this is bad because the depth is okay but you see how narrow this opening is right here so this thing is going to close and once this closes this tree is just gonna have moved a little bit and it's gonna be mostly standing upright you don't want to call stuff with these short notches because the whole idea of having this section of wood out here so that as the tree as the gap starts to close your hinge wood is directing the tree where you want it to go as soon as the face cut closes it's game over it just goes wherever gravity is taking it that's why you want to have it to be you you want your face cut relatively open and on a back leaning tree you want it to be especially open because as this thing stands up before it gets once it's leaning where I wanted to go the face get has to be large so that it has time to close all the way if I just have it open a little bit it's gonna soon as this thing closes then you know the face cuts done operating and by then you just have to hope that you have enough momentum putting it the right way so I'm going to open this up and we're gonna push it over so this is what we call so this is what we call an open face and a disadvantage advantage to this is it's going to close slowly so you'll have more control over a longer period of time a disadvantage is the tip of this tree is gonna dig into the ground especially with our high stoves yeah especially with the high stump so we're gonna break it yeah so the log is probably gonna break in a few spots but I want to do it anyways because this tree leans heavily back and so I want this thing to be nice and open lots of time to close it over and so that's the concept of open-faced cut it's really useful when you have something leaning back it has a long time to close so I'm cut up to where I want to be I'm gonna that another swing and now Dover go ahead and drive forward while I cook I was a little high on this side but it all worked out the same you see what I mean the face can add a long time to close if it would have been would it be narrow or shallow or something arrow if it would've been narrow it would close as soon as you pushed it and then it could have broken and gone who knows where so in the lean back it's nice to have you know a lot of room to work with you know that was the open face that's I get this cleaned up miss another Neil cheek they're usually nails in there [Music] all right one more and it's leaning back hard we got the skid-steer there for a safety in case we need to push it over but we're gonna demonstrate so Jed's gonna demonstrate the back cut first method on this one before I do some stunts like this just know I've got this big giant machine so unless I cut my wood off on the hinge I feel okay about doing this you never want to do this in the wind because it can take the tree before you cut up on your face and now it's anyone's guess as to where it winds up can barber chair out land on the house could be terrible so don't do in the wind don't look do it if you're just starting out and cutting you can do it when you're comfortable with the more traditional stuff I think so this tree leans back hard and you know usually you'd come in and you do your knot first but the problem is with all the weight being displaced back there as you do this you're losing this tension wood right here so the tree wants to sit back naturally so if you go too deep obviously the trees going to start to go over so what you can do is come in with your back cut first and get your wedges banged up and that way those will stabilize the tree and then you can come in and do your face cut to your 10% or whatever and then you'll be all cut up and then you can just keep banging it away so should be done with extreme caution ideally you do something like this you know in the woods you wouldn't have obstructions around here but we've got the skid-steer there for backup in case this isn't going well we'll just push it over so we feel safe but we're gonna demonstrate how to do it back up first this is a way to get a back leaning tree over with no rope it's really good to get that bark off if it acts as a bit of a sponge takes your wedge power and and also can make you think you have a little bit more stump than you really have the only thing that's going to be the only compression the only material that's going to have sufficient compression strength to push this that way off the wedges is the SAP wood the bark does nothing it'll even impede you a little bit [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hey hey nice job Jed yeah Jed's the man good job man so we saw a whole bunch of cuts today good job everybody good job dad that was yeah he did really good you too Chad he did good so did / good job Dover what looks good to me man so that's it hopefully everybody learn something from that that was a fun day yeah one more tree to clean up and then we're out of here it's all kinds of cuts I think that's about it for all there is to know about felling trees that's all we know nice job guys that was awesome all right good job Dover all right that's it that's it for the world's greatest tree felling video you

Channel: Guilty of Treeson

Views: 2,149,891

Rating: 4.8973494 out of 5

Keywords: tree felling, tree falling, tree cutting, tree cutting fails, tree fails, arborist, logger, Jacob rogers, Jed walters, wood, husqvarna, stihl, humboldt, conventional, open faced, backcut first, sizwill, siswill, gap face, gapped face, chainsaw, how to cut down a tree, how to fell a tree, how to fall a tree, Jake rogers, eastside tree works, tree guy, tree work, trees, Douglas fir, wood working, wood chopping, tree dropping, tree cutting accidents, arboriculture, tree surgery, logging

Id: nLIEYvHMS8U

Length: 45min 25sec (2725 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/thagomizerer]

That was great! Thanks for sharing. I've only ever done basic cuts. It was fun to hear the rationale and techniques for some of the others. Also really enjoyed their positive and supportive vibe!

[u/FapTrainer]

I love these dudes cause their infectious positivity. At the end of every video it’s all high fives and atta boys. Plus he is very passionate about cutting down trees.

[u/BroadStreet_Bully5]

Can’t believe I watched that whole thing. That swizell was sweet.

[u/Piccster]

8?!?! I have to watch this...

[u/Derp_Nerpum]

Good thing it is dark outside, because I really want to go cut down trees!!

[u/atheist1963]

Outstanding video. Great teachers. Can't remember the last time I sat through a 45 minute youtube video, but I actually want to watch it again.

[u/mtntrail]

Excellent explanation of cuts and why, not their first rodeo.

[u/blankblinkblank]

I have now misread this title twice as "8 ways to feel a tree"

[u/jnish]

"how can cutting trees be that interesting?"

45 minutes later

"I want to work with these guys!" 😍😭