Spent the weekend with my neighbor doing some storm damage cleanup for another neighbor. 5' diameter White Oak blew over and just missed one of their cottages and the big pavilion. This kept us busy most of the weekend. Here's a few pix. John's 660 clone with the 42" bar on it. He picked it up for $100 and I put a new piston in it for him. Runs pretty good We put 7 or 8 tanks of fuel through it dismembering this tree. Jenny at the root ball. We worked from the top down till it stood up on us... a couple of videos Cutting a limb off with the ported G288. https://youtube.com/shorts/lcOBE2z-KQ Cutting the stem down. https://youtube.com/shorts/HhSIRPR37 They want the 4-1/2' oak that it stripped the branches off on the way down cut next weekend. They kept the big stem wood for some projects they want to do with it. We brought 12 loads of the branch wood home for firewood and a couple saw logs for the mill. That's just a little bit of it.
Holy cow that's a big sum beech ...uh I mean white oak! Gotta be a few cords there easily. Looks like a fun time.
That tree reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac, a story called "Good Oak". A councilor read that story by the campfire one night at a camp I attended, probably as a pre-teen, and it has stuck with me ever since. I need to go dig up one of my copies of the Almanac and give it a reread. Any of you who enjoy outdoor history might enjoy his work. A brief excerpt: "Excerpt from the book A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold It was a bolt of lightning that put an end to wood-making by this particular oak. We were all awakened, one night in July, by the thunderous crash; we realized that the bolt must have hit near by, but, since it had not hit us, we all went back to sleep. Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning. Next morning, as we strolled over the sandhill rejoicing with the cone-flowers and the prairie clovers over their fresh accession of rain, we came upon a great slab of bark freshly torn from the trunk of the roadside oak. The trunk showed a long spiral scar of barkless sapwood, a foot wide and not yet yellowed by the sun. By the next day the leaves had wilted, and we knew that the lightning had bequeathed to us three cords of prospective fuel wood. We mourned the loss of the old tree, but knew that a dozen of its progeny standing straight and stalwart on the sands had already taken over its job of wood-making. We let the dead veteran season for a year in the sun it could no longer use, and then on a crisp winter’s day we laid a newly filed saw to its bastioned base. Fragrant little chips of history spewed from the saw cut, and accumulated on the snow before each kneeling sawyer. We sensed that these two piles of sawdust were something more than wood: that they were the integrated transect of a century; that our saw was biting its way, stroke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of good oak." If you have ten minutes or so, the whole tale is well worth your time: Good Oak, by Ragunath Padmanabhan | ServiceSpace
That’s my favorite size Monte. Helluva good time for sure. I’m green with envy. Keep them pics rollin.
Nice Monte....Can't wait to see that 12' stump "Swedish Candle" filled with magnesium at Walt's GTG this year!! LOL
I looked at John. John looked at me. We both laughed and I grabbed the big saw... I used to shy away from those bigguns, but with the right equipment it's fun and exciting. This was on a hillside with another lakeside shrine building directly below it so we wouldn't have tackled it without having John's loader. We had to position the loader to ensure nothing rolled down there. They were very lucky there was very minimal damage. Taking these big ones apart is like a giant puzzle sometimes that keeps us on our toes...
