Primitive Engineering: Moving Felled Trees by Hand

When a tree is in your way and you don't want to cut it up with a chainsaw!

Leverage… It's a very powerful tool everyone should remember exists.

Last Saturday, we were getting our new Off-Grid Mansion delivered, we were also supposed to have a couple strong friends to help with a few things we wanted to do to prep for our move, including a tree that fell right in the way! They had car trouble and couldn't make it that weekend, but we made due.

You see that forklift to the right in the background? Yeah, that’s just there for good looks. A friend of mine bought it to move some of the things he wanted store on the land and it broke… there’s a massive leak in the hydraulic system and the breaks also don’t work!

When I woke up that saturday morning I had an idea that may help with moving this tree which had fallen the last time a big wind storm come through. We have a chainsaw but I really didn't want to cut it up… it could become a precious beam or some other long and expensive material to build our ctrazy traveling artist homestead with anarchist tendencies with.

(It's a good example of Meterial Capital.)

Jessi-K (my lovely wife) had showed me a video of a guy who moves these enormous concrete blocks on his own with leverage and the help of just a couple pebbles. He believes this technique was used to make Stonehenge:

My immediate question upon seeing the video was about the hard surface he moves these blocks on… surely some 5000 years ago, the people who build this monument didn’t have concrete foundations! I thought I could give it a try with this tree using bigger rocks that hopefully wouldn’t sink into the ground!

And it worked!!! Here's what I did:

The tree had fallen on the top of the forklift and basically broke in half, leaving the crown of the tree somewhere out of the way!

• First I tried to lift one end of the trunk with a 2 X 4 so I could put a rock under it. To have enough leverage to lift the weight of it, I needed to have a long piece of lumber and in return was standing too far to throw a rock in right spot!

If I had someone helping me we could have done it, but I didn't want to wake up Jessi-K, it was still pretty early. Thankfully my friend, who is storing some things here (along with his broken forklift), has one of those hand cranked hydraulic engine hoist!!!

• Next I looked for the perfect rock to place under the tree.

• I placed the rock under the tree, about a third of the way towards the center to create a fulcrum effect, to pivot the tree.

• I pulled the engine hoist out of the way, pushed down on the tree slightly and started turning it. It was as easy as pie to push, as you can see in this video:

• Than I simply repeated the process, alternating two rocks from one side to the other (keeping in mind the stone should be placed off-center) "walking" the tree where I wanted it to end up.

Here's a failed attempt... I placed the stone (the fulcrum) a little too far off-center:

• Before giving up on the placement of that stone, I tried a different approach. What if I lifted it from the other end instead of using my weight to push down on it? Yeah, that worked pretty well.

Eventually I walked the tree trunk over to where I wanted it (more or less), out of the way so we could get the new RV delivered! I learned quite a lot about leverage and moving heavy objects somewhat effortlessly. I definitely want to experiment with this again. Being able to figure out how to move something that big by myself was very satisfying.

If you've tried something similar, I would love to hear about it.