Sunday, February 03, 2008

I'm a lumberjack...

Last autumn (late Sept, early Oct), I started to take down the elder tree back of the garage -- we'd some years back taken down one of the two main trunks because it was full of rot, but the other one had now started to succumb.

By the start of November, I had it down to a stump about 3' high, and took all but a 4' long piece of trunk that was too heavy to shift to the village bonfire.

Early Dec, one of my colleagues came over with a two-man saw and we got most of the way through the stump just above ground level; and from there I just started gnawing away with a smaller gardening saw, until just before the start of the holidays, when I got the stump to start shifting, and from there it was a case of putting a pry-bar in and then wedges (generated by cutting through the higher sections of trunk).

The holiday involved a daily session of sawing the stump, first top to bottom, then each half across, with interludes of sawing the long trunk across, until prybar and wedges could finish the job -- heave the gap open, the wedge falls in, reset the pry-bar and haul again, dropping the wedge further, maybe sawing a bit at the section still holding (since you can never cut on an exact plane), repeating until the last bits tore.

Finally bisecting each half -- and that is now done, leaving me with 8 more readily portable logs about 1' cube in size.

Now next door's big old apple tree has canker and needs to come down...