Thursday, July 17, 2014

Talk About Precise Aim

Talk about precision aim, I have only seen an aim as good as this guy's once before. I saw the following video over at Wirecutter's blog and it immediately reminded me of another excellent piece of work and precision aiming so I had to steal it and repost it here:



That was an excellently calculated perfect job when it came to tree cutting. Can you imagine an aim that precise! That man is a modern artist at work if ever there was one.
 
Seeing that video brought to my mind another man with a precise aim when it came to downing trees. Heck, I have not thought about this in probably more than 30 years and it happened several years longer ago than that. Back in the mid-seventies, I watched my friend's dad chop down a tree at their cottage in upstate NY. We used to crash there after partying in New Paltz; we would raid parties at the college or just bar hop in town - at that time more bars per square foot of any town I had ever visited - pre 21 year age drinking laws.

Well, he chopped down a tree, close to the cottage, close to their garden and picnic table and other structures as I recall. Everyone except him thought the tree was going to fall in the exact opposite direction than he had planned and onto the house, but he told us exactly where the tree would fall. He held out his arms to indicate the width of the tree, walked a path where he said it would fall with arms still held out. We all thought, 'yeah right' and wished him luck. He just went back to cutting.  At one point, near the end, he stopped, examined his work, decided to start cutting somewhat more on a different side and at a different angle and we all thought "Oh Shit" since he seemed to be changing his cutting plan.

When the tree began to fall, it started to come straight down, sliding down - the upper cut area against the lower for a split second. It looked as if it would just replant itself by impaling the cut end of the trunk back into the earth. Then amazingly to we who watched, it started to tilt and somehow fell in the right direction. Not only did it go the right way, it fell exactly where he said it would fall - all in less than a second or two.

He did not use chain saw, he did not use wedges, he used a hand saw and an axe - and a lot of muscle and sweat with that axe and saw - mostly the axe. I vaguely recall that we gave him some help with the saw. He reserved the axe for himself and we just did a bit and only exactly how he said to do it with the saw. He was the artist, the grand planner maker, the master tradesman at work. How I wish we had had an 8mm or 16mm camera to film that at the time (no video recorders or cell phones cameras back then). It was a work of art and he was truly akin to da Vinci at getting it done. Oddly enough, he too, like the guy in that video, was pretty thankful that it had fallen the right way and he wasn't thanking himself either.

All the best,
Glenn B

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