 I'm out here in a pine stand about 300 yards from the Lotech Institute, where I'm building a structure this year. My neighbor's generously offered to let me take down some pine trees planted in 1962 that will be used to build the timber frame structure, but nothing's free, and I'm having a heck of a time. This is a field recording, and this is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Lotech Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 68 on March 24th, 2023, coming to you from the Lotech Recording booth. Thanks for joining us. Today, we're talking about timber and how hard it is to harvest out in a field recording. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno, like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, LotechInstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts, as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also, some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts, unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on that advertising. While all our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they do take resources to make, so if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page, patreon.com, slash Lotech Institute. Another way to support us is to donate your used car. Anyone in the US can contact us in your used car will be picked up, sold, and the proceeds come our way. If you're interested in helping us out, get in touch with us at info at lotechinstitute.org. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website, lotechinstitute.org. As part of the 10-mile building challenge, I'm out here trying to take down pine trees, as I said, about 300 yards from where we're building this structure. The pine trees are going to constitute a lot of the weight of this structure, and they were planted in 1962. Most of them are anywhere from one foot to 16, 17 inches thick at the base, which is great, and we'll cover pretty much all of our our wood needs, which is wonderful. I'm so grateful to my neighbor for letting us take them down, but the problem is they're all planted densely, five, six feet from one another. So every time I cut one down, it's not the, you know, beautiful timber experience that you see on YouTube or have maybe experienced yourself that feeling of kind of suspended animation as this hundreds of or even thousands of pounds of wood falls silently through the air and then crashes down, you know, raising up this beautiful cloud of dust and then, you know, spending most of your time cleaning up what you've dropped down. For me, I've spent well over 80% of my time out here trying to free hangups. A hangup is when the tree catches on another tree when falling, and here it's basically impossible not to hang up because in a pine plantation, they plant close together because they want the trees to grow straight and tall, giving you long, straight grain with a few knots. And this is great for production, but it sucks to clean out kind of thin out because if you're clear cutting them, you just start at one edge and you drop them into the open space. But if you're selecting a few mature trees out of a large stand, the tops are essentially Velcro. And so they fall 15, 20 degrees and then the tops hang with the others way up high. And there's different ways to get rid of a hangup than I've been trying them all. One of them is to cut the base a little more so that there's a notch on one side and then you use a lever and try and rotate it to whichever side seems like it's going to free the tree from where it's hung up. These are big trees. These are 100 feet tall and I don't have the torque to do that. It's just not physically possible for most of these. The density of the tops just hang them up. I don't have the wherewithal or the skill or the training to climb up to the top and cut the tops off and top them before I drop them. And even that would be somewhat fraught because the tops are just going to drop into the other tops and you're going to get a hang up up top while you're up there in a harness with a chainsaw and a lot of moving variables. It's just too dangerous. The other way or another way to clear a hang up is to basically pull the bottom out from under it. So imagine if you were leaning against a door and then someone put a rope around your feet and yank the other way, you would fall flat on your face. That's basically where I'm trying to do the trees and it has worked to some extent, although I've had to cheat. I've had to not only am I using block and tackle that gives me a four to one strength ratio. Sometimes I've had to use my little tiny Honda Fit to add a little more oomph to my pull. Something that back in the day would have been done with horses. Unfortunately, I don't have access to horses. So I'm using a judicious amount of my horsepower here if I have to. And it has helped a little bit. I've gotten one of my two hang ups down that I'm currently dealing with. But the other one is not only precarious, but very shallowly angled. So it's pretty upright, which makes it even harder to pull the base out from under it. At any rate, it's been so far incredibly frustrating build. Not only am I struggling out here with the hang ups, but every week we've gotten a snow or rain in an amount that makes the ground completely soaked and sodden. So far I've gotten my car stuck once, hooray, but I haven't been able to get out here more than one or two times a week instead of four days a week or three days a week, as I need to be. So I'm way behind on harvesting the timber I need and let alone bringing it out and getting it to the mill. I should be already milling. I should be almost done cutting and milling. And if I were able to just simply drop the trees and cut them into lengths and limb them, I mean cutting off the limbs and load them up in the trailer and bring them to the mill, I'd be set. But these hang ups have kept me from getting any real progress, which is frustrating. And also it's partially due to the density, but it's also partially due to the fact that this isn't my profession. And I have used lines up in the tree to try and guide the trees down to a helpful direction and spot, but that hasn't always been possible. So yeah, it's been a real frustration just on the things outside of my control, like the weather and the density of these trees. Another problem has been plumbing. And this is not really going to be a full discussion of plumbing, but let's just suffice it to say we're having trouble getting our plan created and passed state inspection. So we're having to submit a truncated permit application, meaning it's going to be for a workshop, but not yet habitation until we get the plumbing sorted. So just one more step in the frustrating chain that is trying to build something that's sustainable and local in a world where that is so unconventional that it is problematic. And that's one of the themes that I'm really trying to highlight with this build is what we're doing is using local materials, which by definition are, you know, safe, carbon friendly, accessible, and underutilized. But because everybody is so used to importing every single thing that is goes into building a house, they are just the powers that be are just completely flummoxed by using local fieldstone local trees that are then milled and technically ungraded timbers are graded at large scale mills. And you can get number one, two or three or other designations on your studs. So for example, most building studs are number two, they're nicer studs, but you don't necessarily need nicer studs for structural stability. So I'm building with ungraded timber, meaning I have to build with much larger timbers to ensure that there's no structural integrity quality issue inside the timber that's going to cause me to have a failure point in a beam or a post. If you can hear the wind rustling through the trees above me, I'm standing near but not underneath one of my hangups looking that there's there's nothing holding it up other than a few flimsy branches from tree to tree. I can see the wind blowing and you know the wind could take this down at any time has has happened with one or two of my previous hangups, but I can't count on that. We had great wind storms with the rain and precipitation over the last few days yet this tree remains standing. Or maybe you can hear the wind in the background, but no big crash. So I guess for the time being what I'm going to have to do is load up some of my timbers or I guess my my logs that will be timbers into my trailer and bring them home and come back another day and take another run at this hanger. All right, now it's time to do some cleanup. That means picking up my ropes, my straps, my block and tackle, all the different things that have made minimal success I've had actually possible. So right now what I'm doing is I'm taking the ropes out of carabiners being ropes back on themselves so that they're somewhat tidy and easy to get apart. It's really important to use knots that don't tighten under tension but are able to be free. So I'm using lots of bowline knots, lots of sheet bends and other tension fighting knots. You have to respect the great pressure that these ropes are under. They do have a little bit of stretch but if you over, if you ask them to do more than they're designed to do you can have catastrophic failure and things can snap back. So I try and always be not in direct line of the entire kit and caboodle that I'm pulling on. I'm not always possible and I can't always stick to that but I do try and be aware of that. Also when lines are under load, yeah you don't quite know. There's some unpredictability to this because the wood and the trees are organic and they may have strength and they might be hung up in a way that you can't quite see and I have only been injured knock on wood once dropping a tree and that was because I wasn't quite clear of not the tree itself. The tree itself I was far enough clear of but it dropped and hit another tree which then that tree whipped down its branches and and whipped me on my scalp and gave me a superficial scalp wound and I was bleeding from my scalp for what seemed like quite a long time. I got knocked down and I thought I saw all the blood coming. I thought oh no I'm in trouble but I didn't have a lot of pain so I thought oh maybe I'm concussed so I asked myself what year it was and about what time of day it was and then I checked my clock and I was right on with my time of day so I thought okay I can't be that disoriented and I was able to get pressure on the blood and found it was only a only a flesh wound as they say in Monty Python but it was still disconcerting to be knocked on my face and have blood pouring down so yeah I am pretty cognizant and more respectful of even the secondary effects of a tree coming down. I wear a hard hat often but not always and if I'm right now I'm just picking up ropes I don't have a hard hat on I'm not anywhere near let me just double check that yeah I'm not anywhere near enough to the the hanger that I could be in possible danger so I I feel okay being without my hard hat because it's kind of cumbersome and annoying bundling up some ropes here all right one last rope these are all similar to climbing ropes they're but except that they look like climbing ropes but they don't have spring in them they're not dynamic ropes they're called static ropes because I'm putting a static force on them I am not asking them to bounce they do have a little bit of give but significantly less than say your rock climbing ropes I do use other rock climbing equipment carabiners I already mentioned I could also use locking hasps or other cleats or things like that but I'm not I'm just using carabiners because that's what I have available to me if I were to do this professionally or more often I would have more but I I use these as as tools and other aspects of my work so it's nice to have them available you never know when you're gonna need a good block and tackle so I was glad to get that was a new addition to my tool box for this project been meaning to get one but that's one of the problems with this type of life is that it's it's hard to be a minimalist I have a fair number of tools that I use sometimes but when I need to use them I really need to use them and so people talk about minimism and if you live in a city where you can depend on getting your food and other necessities met at any time from a local store or some other place that's fine and good and probably for the best but out here there's not much I can do I can I need a large amount of rope to do different projects to build things and to sustain what we're doing but yeah I definitely wish I had more availability of minimalism sometimes in my life all right so I have my ropes picked up I'm grabbing my cant hook my cant hook is a large three foot long wooden piece with a a metal tooth on the end and then kind of a hook arm about a foot from the end and that hook locks into a tree and then I can use the arm as a lever arm to roll it and I'll use it to lift and move logs on to the trailer where to move things around into more advantageous orientations I can just put a lot of torque rotationally on a log which isn't really possible with my bare hands the ground here is covered with litter of uh not litter not trash litter but leaf litter or I guess pine needles and also dropped limbs and a lot of like underbrush that could you know in theory burn but it also makes for a nice springy bottom here lots of deer like to come in here and hang out because they can see it's dark it's protected they can see out into the fields around them for coyotes people or other things that they wouldn't want to mess around with my last rope here I'm ready to be done with this timberfelling but I'm not even close which is frustrating even though I do enjoy this work it's frustrating when it doesn't move along and that's kind of part of the learning curve of doing this type of thing if I had grown up doing this I doubt I'd be having so much trouble but that's kind of the problem with being able to rely on everything being brought into us we get so used to that that even me who's somewhat used to this sort of stuff it's still a challenge that's it for this week the low tech podcast is put out by the low technology institute the show is hosted and co-produced by me Scott Johnson and co-produced and edited by Hina Suzuki this episode was recorded in the low tech recording room as well as a neighboring tree stand subscribe to the podcast on itunes spotify google play youtube and elsewhere we hope that you enjoyed this free podcast if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash low tech institute and signing up thank you to our forestry and land steward leveled members sam brawn maryland scarpon and the hambuses for their support the low technology institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting you can find out more information about the low technology institute membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org find us on social media and reach me directly at scott at lowtechinstitute.org our intro music today was two hour delay off the album winter lo-fi by hallisana that song is under the creative commons universal license and this podcast is under the creative commons attribution and chair leg license meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit thanks and take care