 Hi, in this video we're going to show you how we took down a 70 foot spruce tree in our grounds and how we split it up. Now we are not professionals and this isn't an instructional video, it's more of a public interest video. So we began by notching out a large notch out of the side of the tree where it was already leaning and in the right way so the wind would blow it over this way. This basically aims the tree directly where we want it to go. So in this case we want it to fall to the left because that's where there's a spot clear for this tree to fall. So here we have Todd Fleming making that notch a little deeper. Now we clear out the other side and begin notching a little higher so that the pieces of the tree that are holding it up will be severed and it will fall into that notch and over to the left. And it took about 30 minutes, however I think if we were to do this more often we could get this tree down at about 15 minutes which is not as fast as a chainsaw but still the ease of the use of the axe and the lack of needing gas or fixing anything probably outweigh that cost. Here we have a tree coming down and here's to us Hustle to get out of the way of that tree coming down. There it goes. So it fell within five feet of where we were aiming it so we were really happy with how that came out so when we are hustling over we can really really need just exactly where it fell. After taking the tree down we had to limit which means taking all the limbs off at least the top side of the tree. We decided to leave the limbs on the bottom because we needed the tree to stay up off the ground for the next part which would be removing or sorry bucking the tree into ten foot sections. Todd continues to use his double-bitted axe and I'm using a Mexican machete I picked up while working in Mexico called a Corba. It's basically I think called a bill hook in English. It's a machete with a curved hook. It works really well for this job so you can see we're working our way across the tree. The weather was nice and cool, a little windy but it was a pretty comfortable day for working out outside so kind of a long process especially because most of the branches on the bottom had died and become seasoned and so they were actually much harder to cut than we expected. The live wood, the green wood would cut much easier. So once we had limbed the trees I took a tape measure and I marked ten foot marks and I slashed them, we had slashings every ten feet and this tells us where we're going to cut the tree using the cross cut saw which is a two person saw you've probably seen on ESPN3 when they do lumberjack games. This type of saw is surprisingly effective. I was shocked at how quickly it would cut through a 15 or 16 inch wide trunk. It went through with actually pretty minimal effort even when we started bearing down the sharpness of the tool and the sharpness is really due to Todd taking great care with his tools but we were able to get through all five or six of these cuts in a matter of minutes. Incredibly fast and actually I can really see the appeal of doing that competitively. I was also impressed with people that would have done this a hundred years ago in lumber caps. They must have been pretty tough individuals to do this all day every day. So these sorts of things probably aren't that unusual to you but what comes next is called ribbing which is basically you know how you take a log and you split it with an axe to get firewood. Well I'm basically doing that with a 10 foot section and obviously it doesn't work as easily as just using one swing of an axe. It's going to take me a little while and it's going to take at least three of these wedges or these splitting malls to get this 10 foot section to split. So as I drive them in it starts to make a split down the log and I'm following a natural split that was already there called a check which is when there's a line across the center. I'm just following that natural split it seems to be the weak spot in the wood and so as I drive these wedges in it opens up that crack a little wider and I just keep working my way down driving these wedges in. It takes quite a lot of time. Unfortunately this tree isn't exactly straight and there's a bit of a about a quarter turn maybe a sixth of a turn in the log itself. So my timber isn't exactly as straight as I would like perhaps somebody else who's been arriving a lot longer than I have could have kept this line straighter than me. Again this is my first time doing it so I'm not a professional or shouldn't be instructing anyone in doing this I'm learning as I go. Here I go. One thing I found is that when it splits well most of the most of the log comes apart there are little small amounts of wood like you can see what I'm chopping there that keep the ends together so I had to get my axe and here I'm not actually splitting the log with it I'm just freeing up those rare bits of wood that stayed between the two different parts. So as I go down here I'm just freeing up the split to open up a little easier. As you can see there's a lot of force on there I have three wedges driven all the way in and still the thing won't go all the way here we have just about at the end and now the final wedge and the other end and now it's completely split but those little bits are hanging it together so I split it open the rest of the way with an axe and finally open. I don't have a broad axe which would be really nice for flattening this out but I'm taking out some of the rise and run to flatten out this logs me a little flatter eventually I'm going to split it again into quarters and then these will become the posts for the chicken coop that we're going to be building obviously I'll make a video of that you can check out that video later where you can check out our blog and other information at lowtechinstitute.org you can find our other videos and our podcast so please check that out and subscribe to our page thanks a lot for watching and take care