Get an ordinary spade and dig away around the trunk, as you encounter roots chop them with an electric saber saw (long coarse blade, just let it plunge into the earth below). Work your way round, and then start angling under, pushing the trunk back & forward to loosen the earth and identify the remaining roots.
I was able to remove several substantial confir & evergreen things like this - not as hard as I'd expected.
Good point that. I used the car to pull out a tree root in the front garden. Rope under enormous tension came adrift from the car and smashed the lounge window! SWMBO was less than impressed.............
Thankfully the room was empty at the time.
Don't use a chain saw BTW - contact with soil seems to blunt the chain in seconds.
If the trees are in a group you could try my technique of placing a scissor car jack between two different diameter trunks and winding.
Where the trunks are similar sizes I put a brace between two trees to double the effective strength and push over a third.
What ever the technique used for levering the trunk you will need some elbow grease with a good sharp grubbing mattock.
Brian
I can't seem to find it broken down further.
On the cable front, I can't find any cable statistics, however:
You could always try a Kinetic Energy Recovery Rope if you like a short but exciting life :-). Trying to get a stuck Chieftain Main Battle Tank out of a pond (don't ask how it both got there and stuck there) consisted of getting another tank, a length of this rope and after tying to both tanks driving flat out until the rope was about twice its length. At this point it all went quiet for a bit, various REME were seen digging holes in the ground for themselves at commendable speed and then the towing tank I was in hit me on the head as it shot backwards at high speed and settled itself on top of the tank in the pond. Where the rope had landed on the wet ground steam was rising in some volume from it.
Good thinking! Could you use a Spanish Windlass to pull two together?
Note to self: Always set up camcorder when doing high energy DIY tasks for possible reselling of mishap footage.
Though knowing my luck the rope would have hit the camcorder before hitting the window :-)
H
clutch is only going to smoke if youre daft enough to sit there with it continuing to slip. An engine can put many 10s of kW into a clutch, and if it slips that all turns to heat. So if it slips, stop. T aint difficult.
Tyres versus wet dirt... no way is that going to wreck any tyres either. Roots could wreck underground things though, so I prefer to leave stumps.
Youre looking at seriousish quantities of wood there, are you not a diyer? If not, diying freecyclers will be happy to take some trunks away. Leylandii are pines.
Twigs can be chipped or just chopped to lengths and piled up. Takes a few years to rot down. Wood chippings can probably be freecycled if necessary, or sold to the local garden centre. Or used as the biggest collection of wallplugs any diyer has ever had :)
NT
Go on then, tell us how you used Expanding Foam to float them out.
On the smaller scale that the OP needs, google for "Tirfor". Expensive to buy, and needs a special cable along with the shackles, straps etc, though you may be able to hire one. A ground anchor may be useful too.
But all the above warnings apply. If you don't know exactly what you're doing, inside a Main Battle Tank might be a good place to work from.
Leylandii are not robust trees. They seem to have far less root than most.
Mulch. Or compost.
Well that's no reason not to use one..the chain will still cut the roots, and new chains are not expensive, and nor is sharpening.
It's far easier to leave the roots in, or leave a 3ft stump for trailing climbers. Drill holes, fill with a noxious substance, creosote is good, then wait a couple of years , the roots pull out. If you insist on de-rooting as well, dig a trench, sever what roots you see, fill with water overnight. A pressure washer is good at finding the roots to hatchet out. Leave as much weight on the tree as possible, tho get rid of the light stuff, then pull,keep people and animals away and stay in the van. Once other roots are visible, hatchet out, then pull again.Repeat. Repeat. Far easier to leave the roots in. Cheaper for the customer
Ian White wrote:
A few years ago I removed about a dozen 30 foot Leylandii.
They are burnable even when freshly cut but it's a very smokey business. The energy content of the logs is so pathetic I would not consider them for firewood.
I cut of all the foliage and stacked it up in a huge heap, about 6m x 2m x
2mAfter about 6 months it had dried out and collapsed to half the original volume. Extremely combustible and very rapidly burnt. Disposed of the logs at the same time.
David
This is what I did on a small conifier I had. I dug around it with a mattock (which cuts the roots easier than a spade) then pushed and pulled cutting new roots as they were disturbed.
If I were the OP I'd probably use a winch or block and tackle aroudn th ebas eof one tree and up the trunk of another and try to chop the roots as they come under tension. Beware of the rope or chain slipping though.
I'd have thought a few dozen rounds from the coax would take them down nicely. Or just gently push them over.
I was told to NEVER use a chain saw in soil. This was by a landscape gardener who'd had the chain fly off when it hit a pebble.
Which can of course be embedded into the wood.
I found a hosepipe with a nozzle actually quite handy to clean off the roots, to visualise where they are. Dig out, and use the hose to spray the soil free, before sawing. Only for well drained soils.
Don't be silly, 110 tons between the two of them was a bit too much even for _two_ cans of expanding foam. We just drove the one on top off the one below and repeated the exercise (with a new rope and going faster). This time it worked the right way around.
The only problem was going to be explaining why all the optics and laser stuff and night vision systems on the lower tank no longer worked very well (or to be more precise were either missing or somewhat squashed). Fortunately tank no 1 had a Lieutenant of Cavalry trapped in it by a buckled hatch cover so we left him to explain it on the grounds that it was all his fault in the first place, that he was a Lieutenant and used to being blamed for everything whether it was his fault or not and anyway he was the only one who could afford to pay to have it put right.
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