Pretty ambitious Dwayne.
A couple of years ago, this very large Cedar tree fell across the creek back behind their mom’s house. Not only that, but it fell dead center across their old well. You can just see the concrete lid and part of the circular concrete well under the tipped trunk.
Dwayne decided it was too much good lumber to let rot away on the forest floor. So he built a 24 foot mill just behind his mom’s house and set out to harvest the tree. The tricky part was getting the tree up the 100 foot creek bank.
When I arrived they had the tree cut from the trunk and had pulled an 8 foot chunk most of the way up the bank with some pulleys and a winch on the hitch of Darren’s truck (that’s David’s basement dweller). But the radiator on the truck had blown and Dwayne was trying to decide how to get it back in business. I thought at first that it sounded like a blown hose, but closer inspection revealed that a three inch chunk of the front wall had blown out. Strange.
The next day David had to get some work done, so Dwayne and I set out to work on the log. First, we had to get the truck back on line, so we called a radiator guy in Bellingham who said he had a replacement on hand. We then removed the blown radiator and headed to B-ham.
The guy at Whatcom Radiator and Battery was quite the character; a Trump supporter. But we kept our laughter to ourselves and he was very helpful despite this mental disability. He transferred all the hardware from the old unit to the new and replaced the fittings that the new unit came with with ones that matched the old one. A quick stop at KFC and we were heading back to Sumas to reinstall our new hardware.
It was then that we discovered the reason for the failure in the first place. The new radiator didn’t fit quite right. Along with the left side of the bumper and grill being pushed in from a collision some time ago, so too was the post that the radiator was mounted to. The radiator had been twisted a good inch from one side to the other. It was now more surprising that the thing didn’t split open during the collision than that it failed during Dwayne’s winching work. We re-mounted it with some spacers on the other side so that it wasn’t under any strain and we were back in business.
Back out at the tree, we cut it in half, which was a little tricky because it was a good four feet off the ground in the center. We strapped one side to a tree so it was less likely to roll onto Dwayne as he notched the top before cutting up from the bottom. It worked perfectly and we soon had the tree cut in half.
We cut bevels into the end of the log to help keep it from plowing and catching on other obstacles as it came up the hill. Then rigged a z-drag pulley system in a tree at the top of the hill to give the winch a bit of a break.
The winch had a 5% duty cycle meaning it would only run for 45 seconds at a time. The manual said we had to wait 14 minutes between runs. The down time was somewhat shorter than that but it still made for a very long, tedious process.
We managed to move the log to the bottom edge of the hill, and the next day David and I got it to where it was just starting up the slope. It’ll be interesting to see if they get that log all the way to the mill. It’ll be a very long job at the rate we were going.