Stihl MS251
Husky 445
Dolmar 421
Mods here are shit
Some other saw
I wouldn't buy the 576XP. Not that it is a bad saw. It was state of the art...ten years ago. If you want a big bore Husqvarna with an auto tune carb, the 572XP is where it's at. Well worth the extra $400ish if you can afford it.
That Echo 7310 is supposedly going to be in the $750-780 range street price. I haven't seen one locally yet. Lot of UK and Canada users are saying it's the balls. Especially when ported and tuned. A little on the heavy side and has a manual adjustment carb, but a well thought out saw all around with excellent air filtration.
At least it’s not his trigger finger....
Dont have pics but a metal fab company I worked at had a pretty good size shear. It had this auto shear feature that once the metal was detected it would cut. This machine would cut 1/2 inch steel plate easily. Anyway the operator had it on auto and stuck a small piece of metal in. He had to put his hand past the guard because the piece was so small. Unfortunately auto shear also has auto hold where hydraulic driven rods hold the metal in place. So of course his finger was exactly where the holding rod comes down. When he took off his glove part of his finger stayed in the glove. Pinching is painful. Id say you got pretty lucky.
I'll wager you a PF dollar™ 😎
The lunatics are running the asylum
So I spent the better part of yesterday turning this...
Into this...
Those were three pretty big oaks that Sally tangled up and knocked down. Kind of hard to tell from the pics, but the top half of the trees are hanging out over the pond. The biggest oak (furthest left) is probably 40” across near the base. The others were probably closer to 30” across. This is my neighbor’s place. A ”friend” quoted her $6,000 for removal. I think that may have included plucking the stumps and hauling off the debris - not sure.
At first look, neither she nor I thought we could handle this. Big trees, tangled up, with a lot of overhead cutting. Pretty damn sketchy. Kind of thought a crane and/or skidder would be needed. But after dude threw out the $6k quote, I went and took another look. I talked her in to us taking a whack at it. I told her we would go one limb/cut at a time and either of us could call it off if we did not like what we were seeing. Well, we were able to dismantle that mess one limb/cut at a time.
We used my MS 390 and her Kubota tractor with a grapple on front (45 horse tractor?), and chain. We also had her new MS 271 and some chain. We worked for a few hours one evening until dark and then about six hours the next day (yesterday) to get it done. It really wasn’t that horrible. It was literally one cut at a time. It took a lot of time just snaking out the cut limbs and dragging them to the burn pile. I used that “down time” to ponder the next cut. I pinched the bar about half a dozen times. The last few pissed me off pretty good, but considering the number of cuts I made on some really janky pressurized limbs, I guess it was okay. I will say that we maxed out what the MS 390 (20” bar) and her tractor were able to do. Would have really loved to have the MS 661 for some of the bigger cuts (still working toward that purchase).
My biggest take away from this job was that she and I both focused on the big azz trunks with the first look when we should have been looking at the tops of the trees. The pond was an added complication, but in retrospect, the stuff hanging over the pond was too high to reach “from the ground” anyway. We thought someone would have to climb out there and cut, but that ended up not being the case. I made very few cuts while standing up amongst the branches. Anyway, this was the biggest cutting job I have undertaken to date and was pretty happy with how it turned out. No one got hurt and there was minimal cussing. Calling it a win.
Last edited by Tensaw; 11-01-2020 at 09:30 AM.
One more pic with the tractor for perspective.