Mini vs. tree

[joispoi]

Yesterday morning, I got into work. The boss sends me to get another crew started on a job then tells me to go to the lot where he's going to build his new house. He tells me he wants help dropping a tree. So I grab the saw and head out.


It's about 10 am when I finally finish my rounds and make it over to his place. When I get there, he tells me, "We should have this down by lunch time, right?" Not wanting to dash his hopes but still wanting to lead him back to reality, I told him I thought it might take a little longer than that. BTW- he had just told me that we weren't going to drop the tree with the saw, we were going to use the mini. I knew then, that I'd be lucky if I could leave work at 5pm.









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BTW- That's not me in the pictures. (Anybody who wants to see pictures of me on the internet has to go to another site, prove they're over 18 and pay the membership fee like everybody else)

 

[strott]

How long did it take?

So you literally pushed the tree over without cutting it down or reducing the height of it?

Haven't seen a peljob EB12.4 for a while!!

 

[joispoi]

We pulled the whole tree down at 5pm. It took a little working the clutch and rocking with the Iveco, but it finally came down.

 

[bpogue]

That looks like fun. Sometimes it is amazing to see what we can do with compact equipment if we try. I took a tree down with mine that was 6' across at chest height. My mini ex and skidloader couldn't lift the root wad to load it. That took some thinking to get it loaded! But it sure was fun.

 

[maddog]

I did about 20 60-80' pines that way with my mini and dozer. I hooked a long winch/cable to the dozer and dug with the mini. I needed to remove stumps because of pond work.

 

[tuney443]

I guess if time isn't that important to you,I suppose it doesn't matter but IMHO 6-7 hours,2 men,2 pieces of iron for what appears to be a 24''-30'' diameter tree is way too long.I hope your boss isn't going to try to excavate the foundation with that Tonka toy.

 

[joispoi]

I know what you're saying. If I still had my old PC300 and had it there, it would have been down in 3 minutes.

There's no way I could see justifying a bill for this to a customer. But since this was at his house, and the equipment is paid for, his only cost was my wages. I wouldn't even have a machine delivered for what it cost him to drop the tree, remove the stump and truck the trunk back to the saw mill.

I haven't asked, but I'm sure he's going to dig the foundation with that same mini. Foundations here are slab on grade for the most part with no frostwall.

 

[upnover]

Looks like it either rained or you have a high water table over there with all the water where the root ball was! No wonder you are slab on grade

 

[joispoi]

That's the water table. It's also the level of separation between topsoil and gravel. There are several old quarries in town. The last of which is closing up soon. There's a gravel bed all throughout the area that's about 15 meters deep (even deeper in some places), and it's only about 1 meter below grade. Gravel sells for about 30 euros a ton in these parts. Only problem is, that nobody has mining rights to sell their gravel.

 

[k45]

You were lucky it wasn't a tree with a tap root! Some of the species here have tap roots going down almost as big in diameter as the truck. Others, like yours, are all surface roots.

Ken

 

[joispoi]

Yeah, if it was a tree with a tap root, we wouldn't have touched it to begin with. I don't quite know the name of the tree. My boss told me, but my French isn't that good and some words sound more jumbled up to me than others....the name of this tree species is one of those words. The roots are soft, light and brittle and with a little patience can be snapped with a tinker-toy excavator.

 

[Excavator759]

last summer i took about 10 trees out like that with my BC430 and a skid loader. it was a doctors house and there was no way to get anything bigger back there without tearing up all his high dollar landscaping. it was a painfull 3 day job that i could have done with my kobelco 160 in about a day. the ones that are really funny are the guys with the lil farm tractors with a front end loader that think they can move a mountain and take down any tree.

 

[Hendrik]

And this, children, is how people get hurt.
A good size root could have tossed that Kub like a ball.
BTW does that series 1 have expanding tracks?

 

[littlejoe4]

just curious is there a benefit to doing it that way instead of cutting it with a saw then digging up the root after its down, seems dangerous to do it together, does the weight of the tree make the root system dig out and come out easier?

 

[joispoi]

And this, children, is how people get hurt.
A good size root could have tossed that Kub like a ball.
BTW does that series 1 have expanding tracks?

The roots on this tree are brittle with practically no elasticity. Not much opportunity to build much potential energy.

Actually, Strott nailed it. It's a peljob eb 12.4. I don't know how he spotted that. :beatsme This mini does not have expanding tracks.

just curious is there a benefit to doing it that way instead of cutting it with a saw then digging up the root after its down, seems dangerous to do it together, does the weight of the tree make the root system dig out and come out easier?

Dropping it with the saw would have been much faster and easier to get the tree on the ground. But there's no way the peljob would have dug out that stump without the redneck engineering that was used. The building company I'm currently working for doesn't own anything bigger.

I don't recommend this method. I just wanted to share an odd day at work.

 

[strott]

The peljob eb12.4 is a 1.4 ton mini with a mitsubishi 15HP engine, no servo controls, single speed tracking, fixed width undercarrige and a small digging envelope by modern standards. (very similar dig depth/reach to a modern micro like the Kubota K008-3!!)

The machine was essentially replaced by the Peljob EB150 (now the VOLVO EC15/EC15B).

I reckon it may of got that root out, if the tree was cut down and a decent 6 ft of stump was left sticking out of the ground to lever with once the tap roots were ripped apart!! Wouldn't of been quick though but a good challenge.