Shansen

I was a farmer for 27 years and did that until almost all my money was gone. My Father was an Apricot then Walnut farmer so I grew up caring for trees and though I raised mostly row crops I still had a walnut orchard and an apple orchard. When I quit farming I got a job as a tech support first in San Francisco then in a neighboring town at the Gallo Winery in Modesto. I didn't like it much. You knew that no matter how well you worked or how hard you worked you would still make the same. I saw an ad in the newspaper for a guy selling out a tree business a couple of towns away and I called him. I took 3 vacation days from work and went with him to just hang out and watch them work. I bought the business from him and figured I would primarily do work from the bucket as I had purchased a bucket truck from him. I had a climber hired and he soon became unreliable and I got another and another and still unreliable. Finally I had a big climbing job to do and that was the only job I had to do so I decided to climb it myself. It took me 3 times as long as it should have but I completed it. That is when I started looking online for advice on safety and productivity. My Father had about 3300 walnut trees that we pruned ourselves for several years. If someone would have told me back then that I would be doing nothing but pruning trees for a living 30+ years from now I think I would have ended things right there. Now I kind of like it, most of the time.

Here is a job we did by Tulloch lake in Jamestown, California. The first is just a picture of my truck and pickup. The second is looking across a forebay at some grazing land on the other side. These were taken a couple of months ago. We removed a bunch of dead pines but they were surrounded by a thick stand of other trees that you can't see where we did anything.

Merry Christmas everyone.

That's what I was going to say.

I think keeping the blades sharp, changing the oil in the motor, keeping antifreeze in the cooling system, blowing the debris out of the radiator, keeping everything greased, letting the motor warm up and cool down, and not chipping too large a wood especially hard dry wood.

I'm with Bullman here. The occasional user/weekend user is going to get lumped in with the chronic user because there is no way to weed him out. Ha. However workplace safety and public safety takes prescedence over recreation and rightly so.

Here is my new truck engine on it's way to get the fuel injectors adjusted at the local GMC dealer.

Who are your buddies OM?

Here are some pictures of my contract climber guy, working on my Aunt's trees in Camaron Park, Ca by Sacramento.

I've heard it called a flip line hitch. It's what I was taught also. Camming device is much easier and faster to adjust.

It's not very often we get to blow the chips out into the trees.

Absolutely! The sad thing is that for me getting rid of that much wood with so little effort, is pretty exciting.

What would life be like if not for trips to the dump.

I was lucky. The spars didn't come apart until the tree hit the ground. I had a near diaster on another tree at which I learned my lesson to either tie them together up top with a rope strong enough to hold them. Or treat them as indivual trees.

Here is one where I narrowly skirted disaster.

It was deceptively tall. People are somewhat afraid of those trees now as they have been being set on fire for the last couple of years.

Here is a job on the "wrong" side of the tracks. A guy had bought some house that was in disrepair and had totally re-done the whole house. He was going to pour a new driveway and wanted this tree out of there as he thought it would eventually crack his new driveway as it had cracked the old one. My original plan was to piece the tree down, but it was so tall that putting a block as high as my bucket would go and cutting above it would result in a piece large enough to touch the garage or my truck. So after letting one piece down I decided to fall it into the street.

Yeah, that thing was all rotten and crazy big.

Yeah, we can tell.

Here is some before and after pictures on a Cottonwood tree I did a couple of years ago for the Army Corps of Engineers in Knights Ferry CA. The third pic is me taking a dump afterwards.

Here is one that I took before I became obsessed with Owl do-do. It is from up in my bucket looking over the Stanislaus River at the Del Rio golf and country club. (which is as close as we could get before those goose stepping security guards nabbed us)

Here are pictures on a job I did on Thursday of last week. It was a tree of heaven and we got the bucket truck through a very narrow driveway and the back yard was full of dog poop. My daughter helped us and she raked do-do for about a half hour while we were setting up. There was a telephone line and a secondary line which ran rather close to the dripline of the tree so it made for a rather small landing zone. I tied the phone line to the electric line with a rope giving myself a few extra feet of room.

I'm right behind you.

Just you wait till the video comes out you olddd, monkey you. Nice pictures. You been holding back on us?

Group hug!