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Safely Remove 'Widow Hangers' and Large Trees

9:02
13:22
8.7K views

At 9:02 in

Dropping Trees with an Excavator 4K

What happens here

Address any 'widow hangers,' which are dangerous trees that have fallen but are resting precariously on other standing trees. Use the excavator's boom and bucket to carefully push or pull these trees down. Exercise extreme caution, as the excavator's cab is not designed for the same level of impact protection as a skid steer. For larger, stubborn trees, use the power of the excavator's tracks to back up and drag the tree out. The turntable (swing mechanism) of the excavator can be used for precise positioning and control, but it has less power than the tracks for direct pulling. Preserve the cleared vegetation (topsoil and branches) as much as possible for future forest regrowth.

Goal: Remove dangerous and large fallen trees using specialized excavator techniques.

Tools and materials

  • Dirt/Soil N/A — To be separated from wood and potentially reused for grading
  • Fallen Trees / Widow Hangers N/A — Dangerous obstacles to be removed
  • Kubota KX040-4 Mini-Excavator Kubota — Removing dangerous trees and manipulating large logs
  • Personal Protective Equipment — Ensuring safety during heavy machinery operation and tree removal

What they say

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bit all right we got a good size tree right in front of us right there and we don't want it to fall on the cab this cab does not have the same kind of protection that the skid loaders [Music] have so we just got to be a titch care FL she's up there Widow hanging right now Widow hanging Widow hangers are trees that fall in the woods that end up laying on other trees there we go got her down safe and sound now we got to break her out of that [Music] bank all that good black dirt even that won't go to waste what they do with the black dirt as I've been putting it over here I've been preserving all of the the vegetation on the top and that way I can just lay that back down and I can have my Forest regrowing the entire bionome of the forest sometimes the tracks are more powerful than the boob so we're going to back up using the traps to drag this tree out you can see how she's going right there we'll get that down the excavator in this case just gives us a little bit more control over this tree to be able to try to get this out I'm going to try to turn her and that's about as far as I can go the turn table on an excavator doesn't have a whole lot of power not like your breakout course for digging into the soil what have you [Music] there you go try to keep the tree out of the dirt as much as possible cuz when you go to chainsaw it every time you hit a little chunky chunk of dirt you're basically wrecking your [Music] all right let's try to get the root balls of these two trees lined up that might be a tiny bit tricky like I said trees don't like to spin the turntable of an excavator that's the ability to go left and right isn't nearly as strong as your ability to dig straight up and down and not I'm not saying that for you guys that know how to run excavators cuz you obviously know I'm saying that for the guys that are watching along and kind of living vicariously through us through our experiences our mistakes just like that one ha what the mistake was that I dropped the tree I didn't have it clamp it's cuz you guys were distracting me it's your [Music] fault go get them root balls lined up as best we can we got them over there lined up we can do a little bit of a better job we'll back up

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