Forestry Memories

Demonstration of felling with axe and hand saw

Photographs courtesy of Robbie Bruce, Drummuir, who with his three brothers took part in a felling demonstration using axes and cross cut saws in Glenlivet forest possibly around 1995-1998. Charlie, Jimmy and Gordon Smith and Robbie Bruce sharpened up some old axes, reset and sharpened old hand saws and proceeded to lay in, fell, sned and cross cut some modest sized Norway spruce trees in the forest.

This is a view of Gordon Smith with a six or seven pound axe working his way up a fairly heavily branched Norway spruce tree cutting off the branches. Normally the operator started working from the butt with back towards direction of work standing side on to the stem. In this position the side branches on both sides of stem could be tackled. A slight shift of feet and swivel of the body to face the tree enable the operator to tackle the branches on the top and some on the bottom surfaces of the stem usually with one stroke of the axe per branch. Heavy branches caused the operator to sometimes stand back in a good stance and tackle each branch with one or two more power strokes all of which slowed the rate of output quite a bit. It was difficult to remove all the bottom branches on the first run up the stem and usually the whole tree had to be rotated on its axis a bit to allow access to those that remained. If one was lucky the tree could be easily pulled over to reveal the lower branches but often as not it had to be rolled with a cant hook or (the death of all axe handles) by taking a heavy blow with the axe into the centre of the butt and once the blade was fast use the axe handle as a lever by pushing sideways on the shaft hoping it would not crack!

In the 1970s Swedish light weight axes around two and a quarter pounds were introduced and if kept sharp were very effective for most conifers.

Groups: Forestry Areas, Forestry in Action, Northeast Scotland , Tools, equipment and clothing

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