Just finished my first full crown reduction on a mature oak

Lost a big limb on a red oak in Helena last month because I undercut the weight wrong, so I spent a week studying the cut sequences before trying again on a smaller one. This time the whole job took 4 hours and the tree balanced out great, has anyone else had trouble judging weight on overgrown branches?

1 comments

1 Comment

avery_carr5717d ago

Feeling that weight is the whole game, isnt it? I noticed the same thing when I switched from small jobs to anything with real girth, and its kinda the same with learning to carry a heavy cooler up stairs or judging how much a loaded wheelbarrow will tip. You can read all the charts you want, but the real lesson is in how the tree shifts when you make that first cut, like it tells you right away if you guessed wrong. Sounds like that failed limb taught you more than a hundred videos could, honestly. What did you change first, the direction of the notch or the depth of your back cut?