My primary project for the past several weeks has been cleaning up a large yellow poplar tree that fell in a late winter storm, and converting it into lumber and firewood. It is also where the money I might otherwise have spent on new Festool products has gone. The tree was about 130 ft tall, and over 50 ft to the first major branch, and about 110 inches circumference 10 ft above the root ball. It lies across a compound curved area with the root ball higher than where I am working.
Here are some photos of this project. I am working alone on this project, using a Husqvarna 346 XP chainsaw (50 cc, 3.7 HP) with a 20 inch bar (in the photo below, the orange plastic guard on the saw is 24 inches in length), and Granberg's small milling jigs. I much larger (28 to 32 inch bar) and more powerful saw (at least 5 HP) would have been welcome to speed up this work, and to enable cutting completely through the log in a single pass. Some of my rough boards are about 20 inches wide, and about all that I can lift and carry to the pile of rough lumber.
The point at which the poplar tree trunk is resting on the older fallen oak trunk beneath it is nearly 50 ft from the root ball. When I first tried to jack up the tree at this point concurrently using both an 8T and 4T bottle jacks, all I succeeded in doing was driving my ~18 diameter oak log section supports into the ground and/or the ram into the trunk of the tree. I eventually succeed by inserting a steel plate on top of the ram and adding more log sections support points until the ground underneath no longer compressed. I left the sections of the trunk connected to one another to provide stability against the tree sliding or rolling down the incline.
My pile of rough lumber is now about 5 ft tall, and still growing. I've saved about a cord of wood to use as firewood, although I realize poplar is not great for that purpose, and thrown even more into the ~70 ft deep forested ravine at the back of my lot.
