A friend Verne came out with his friend Kevin who has years of experience cutting trees. Verne has cut trees for me in the past, but he has recently had some knee operations and says he doesn't move fast enough for falling trees.
They were planning on bringing down four trees but the first one was a bit harder than they thought. Keven brought about a half dozen plastic wedges for the job and was needing more. My predilection for buying wedges when they are found cheap helped out as did my propensity to hang on to pieces of scrap metal. All his wedges, my wedges and some of my scrap metal finally caused a big popping sound in the tree and a huge thud when it hit the ground. Candy came out to look saying, "it shook the whole house."
Attachment 371601
The red thing on top of the stump is a yard stick. We measured the stump and it was 6' across at the cut.
There were some soft spots of rot in the tree so the butt was cut off:
Attachment 371603
Hopefully it will be possible to cut a notch out of the butt to make a bench. The stump might be a bit more work, but if it can be cut out it would make a nice sitting spot for a couple of people.
The saw man used a new chain on a 36" bar and stopped to sharpen the chain twice. In one of the soft spots we found an old tennis ball.
We only got the one tree down before it was getting too dark to work safely.
jtk
