I've also got a grinding head on one of my excavators and there is no way I'm going near these dead ash with it, even with a complete fabricated steel rops guard covering the entire cab and steel sheeting blanketing the whole machine, until the trees are down on the ground, I'll pass and I've ground off at ground level five foot diameter tree's before and shoved them over with the grinding head, then mulched the whole tree up and ground the stump into the ground a foot or so with my grinding head, just to bump or tap these things, will bring the top over on your machine, they usually break off about half way up and come over you without warning or one next to you will topple over you as your watching the one your working on. Most of these are about 10 feet spacing in about any direction. I'd thought to use the head to shoot larger limbs off the box elders from around the outside perimeter into the dead ash to try to knock them down or hammer them somewhat and knock the stuff down that way. If you do it right you can sling human body size stuff a couple hundred feet into the timber, but you have very little control for aiming the chunks, we mainly do it along timber boarders to save having to grind it all up, mainly couple hundred pound limbs, just shoot it farther into the timber just to get rid of it, and let it rot down there to save time. I can reach up about 20 feet with the grinding head and can cut with it upside down to notch the tops and then still shove them over to break them off, grinding with the head upside down also shoots the chips and debris up and away from you, which aids in knocking off limbs on tree's behind or around the one your grinding on. If you can get the top to stay connected to the trunk by shoving it over, and get it to roll over and lean next to the trunk, then you can grind both the top and trunk together from where it broke off all the way to the ground, saves having to chase the tops and limbs that way and is also quicker to grind the whole tree to chips.
Its been raining here the last few days, again, and we went today to look it over some more, I'm not even considering grinding it, not wanting to track up to any of it with anything I own or have to fix or pay for and in all reality, mother nature can do the work for me and when it gets to the point of being safe, I'll deal with it then, my crew has worked hard to talk me out of this job until it is safer to do and today they might just have convinced me to just wait it out, and let gravity take do its thing, there are enough other things to do the way it is, I'm not sure we can get everything else done anyhow before spring, why take on even more still, that and I doubt anyone else will do it so it'll be there next year or the year after that or basically whenever I feel safe doing it.
Its been raining here the last few days, again, and we went today to look it over some more, I'm not even considering grinding it, not wanting to track up to any of it with anything I own or have to fix or pay for and in all reality, mother nature can do the work for me and when it gets to the point of being safe, I'll deal with it then, my crew has worked hard to talk me out of this job until it is safer to do and today they might just have convinced me to just wait it out, and let gravity take do its thing, there are enough other things to do the way it is, I'm not sure we can get everything else done anyhow before spring, why take on even more still, that and I doubt anyone else will do it so it'll be there next year or the year after that or basically whenever I feel safe doing it.