Manual Pole Saw

Wolf Garten make an extensible pole (4-5 m), which can take either loppers or a saw. The saw is useful on its own, and I recommend the heavier duty anvil lopper.

Regards, Nick Maclaren.

I forgot to say that I mean the unpowered one. The powered one may work, but would be a weight at the end of a long pole.

Regards, Nick Maclaren.

I've got the wolf-garten pruning saw and 4m telescopic handle (plus a lopper) pretty sharp and shaped so that it stays in the cut.

PC370MSPRO ZMV4 RCVM

Sensibly, you can reach a branch 5m above ground, you soon work out that you've barely got a second to run once a branch starts to drop!

Wear a hard hat. My father didn't and a branch hit him on the head and fractured his skull. He died 3 weeks later without regaining consciousness.

I thought you were supposed to make a shallow cut on the underside of the branch you intend to saw through just on the "trunk" side of the proposed cut, so that when you cut through the branch from the top it doesn't tear a long strip of underside bark with it when it breaks.

How do you do the underside cut with a concave saw blade several metres up?

I boughtb a long pole battery powere chain saw from Ryobo - there are doubtless other makes. A lot easier than manual sawing.

IME, with great difficulty ;-)

However if you are mostly below the branch you are more cutting it from the side rather than above - so that can "snap" cleaner than a vertical down cut.

I have a Darlac ~5m extending pole, that you can mount cord operated loppers on (for branches up to 2"), or a green wood saw.

They work very well with the lopper. The poll saw is "ok" but can be hard work - also you can sometimes pull the poll off one of its length preset detents (they are sprung pins that pop out through holes in the outer sleeve of the poll).

Note that at full extension are pretty heavy with the lopper on the end. So difficult to control after the cut completes. The best you can usually do is influence the descent of the poll rather than fully catch or stop it).

You can't but the old Silky I have has a chisel at the base of the saw blade , so you reduce the weight with a cut away from the stem and attempt to incise the bark and a bit of sapwood with the chisel before the final cut. In practice you never get an ideal cut along the branch collar with a pole saw but often it doesn't matter if you are not near the stem with your final cut.

In that situation, I cut the branch off further out than where I want the final cut. I then tidy up with a second cut at the desired point. Having removed the weight of the branch, a tidy final cut is easy to do. More work, but much less fiddly.

I put a rope on the branch (or main stem), and tie it off so that it is prevented from falling 'the wrong way'.

A hard hat sounds like a good idea but I find they seriously restrict my view of things above me - which is a real handicap in this context.

And eye protection !!!!

Thanks for all the suggestions.

One of my issues is that I already have several long loppers.

One is an earlier version of this

Unfortunately their current saw attachment

I also have an old unbranded cord and pulley lopper.

Additionally, because a supplier kept shipping me the wrong item, and told me to keep it

It has turned out to be really useful. Great for dead heading the climbing roses, and for pruning thin branches it is far easier to wield than heavier loppers.

I guess, with hindsight, I should have gone for a different original solution. :-(

Chris

Yes. I bought one for SWMBO after she expressed an interest, but I've used it far more that she has. It's really useful for dealing with brambles in overgrown parts of the garden - without getting either too close or battle scars.