Moving a Big Stump

We have been digging steadily for the past two weeks and have reached the location of the tree we removed on Mar 12.  It was a big tree and it had a big stump.  We don't have a general solution for dealing with stumps.  Small ones we can burn.  Medium sized ones we often bury if we can get them to a suitable location.  Really big ones are something of a problem - mainly because they are very heavy and hard to move.  The stump we extracted today probably weighs in at a couple of tons.  We can't lift it - we can only push it around.  In any case we had to get it out of the build site.

The big stump right after we pulled it over with the excavator.

There is a large amount of dirt and rock stuck to the root mass.
The wood is heavy but the rock and dirt is even heavier.

We cut the trunk off as close to the bottom as we could.
We used the excavator to knock some of the dirt and rock from the bottom to try and lighten it up.
That helped a little but the thing was still pretty heavy.  

The excavator can't pick it up but it can push it down the hill out of the build site.

We got it to the bottom of the hill.  We wanted to push it up the next hill to a location where we could bury it but it could not be done - too much friction, too much gravity.  We left it where it is - in a future blog entry I will tell you how we finally moved it - assuming we figure that out.

Mud Control

Now that we are digging again, we have a lot of dirt and rock to move around.  We have put in a fairly extensive system of roads to facilitate this operation but some of the roads are still rather basic.  We have been bringing dirt up to an area we call the "filled hollow".  To get to this location more easily we built a short section of curved road cutting a rather tight corner.  We call this little road the "fillet road" because it resembles (to us) a fillet weld between two perpendicular sections of metal.  Unfortunately, The fillet road happens to be in a spot where there is a natural seepage of water from uphill - a sort of almost-spring.  The result is persistent mud, even now when it hasn't rained recently.  We had been driving the tractor through it anyway but it was getting rather messy and every time we drove through it the ruts got a little deeper.  We decided to get some coarse stone and finally fill fillet road.  It worked excellently.  Fillet road is still wet - but it is wet stone rather than wet mud.

Fillet road - wet and muddy

Nick dumps a load of stone to fill the ruts and control the mud.

We brought the stone in with our F450 truck.

Fillet road - stoned and ready for serious traffic.

Digging Resumes

We are getting an early start on the digging season this year.  The weather is warm, and more importantly, dry.  We still have about 200 tons of dirt to move before we are ready to start building, so the sooner we can get started, the better.

My view from the seat of the tractor with a full load of dirt

We are creating a flat area next to our main road with some of the dirt we remove from the build site.

Physics is Used to Take Down a Tree

Today we took down the second big oak of the week.  This one was larger than yesterday's and caused us a little trouble.  One of the principle difficulties felling large oaks in a forest is getting them to fall where you want.  Any logger can tell you the general technique for felling a tree: You cut a notch on the side of the tree towards where you want it to fall.  Then you back cut the tree, sometimes driving a wedge behind your saw blade on a large tree to help tip it in the right direction.  Ideally the tree falls towards the notched side.  This works nicely on straight vertical pine trees where the center of mass of the tree is located directly above the center of the diameter of the tree.  On forest oaks this is almost never the case.  The center of mass may be as much as a meter or more away from the center of the base.  No mere notch is going to help make that tree fall anywhere except towards its center of mass.   We have had to put physics to work in order to reliably fell an oak where we want.  Our technique is to provide a force in the direction we want the tree to fall in order to compensate for the off balance force of gravity due to the lean of the tree.  For most trees the force needed is not too difficult to achieve.  We tie a rope around the tree as high as we can, typically 20 to 25 feet (6 - 7.5 m) up is adequate.  We then set up a come-along on the rope attached to any convenient anchor point, usually another tree trunk.  We cut the usual notch in the tree in the direction of the rope and we tighten up the come-along.  It doesn't take as much force as you might think.  For example, a 3000 lb. tree leaning at 5 degrees is only producing a torque of 261 lbs x the vertical distance to the center of mass of the tree.  So if we attach our rope anywhere near the center of mass of the tree we only have to pull with about that much force to pull it over.  Of course this is more than you could pull by hand but the come-along can pull with many times this force limited more by the strength of the rope employed than the come-along.  In the case of today's tree this technique was essential.  The tree looked fairly vertical but when we started to back cut it the tree started to lean in the wrong direction.  We actually had to increase the initial force we had with the come-along to get it to fall in the right direction but physics worked again and the tree fell right where we wanted.  Archimedes would have approved.

The tree of the day with the rigging rope attached.

The trunk of the tree was fairly vertical
but the branches were concentrated on one side .

For this big tree we had to put the 20 inch blade on our Stihl chainsaw.

A close up of the rigging in the tree.

The come-along being set up to pull on the tree.

The notch cut is made. 

With a bit of a pull the tree comes down where we wanted it to.

The behemoth on the ground.

This trunk will make excellent timber.

We got four sections of trunk from this tree which pretty much filled our new log crib.

Spring Comes Early - Work Resumes

The sun is shining, the air is warm, breathe deep that 293 ppm carbon dioxide.  Sometimes ya gotta love this whole climate change thing.  I wasn't expecting to get too much done this early in the season but I can't ignore fine weather like this.  We have a lot of digging to do but first we have got to get a couple of big trees out of the way.

Nick is standing in front of the two trees we plan to take down this week.
They are fairly large and we plan to save the trunks for future lumber.

Cutting the first tree.

It falls neatly into our level dig site.
This type of oak does not grow very straight but the wood has a beautiful dark color.

This was a fairly good size tree so the logs are going to be rather heavy.

We got three 13 ft lengths of wood out of this tree.
This is the last, and heaviest, section.

The three logs loaded onto our new wood crib for long term storage.
We still have to seal the ends.