Last spring I had a bad fracture in my left wrist, had surgery to put the fragments together, and then got the bombshell advice to avoid use of vibrating machinery like petrol chainsaws from now on. As you can imagine, that’s a life changing injury in my case. Since then I’ve been working out what to do and getting as much advice I can including from my physiotherapist. I’m planning to make posts about how I carry on managing Century Wood and I hope it will be useful for other people who are dealing with injuries and conditions like arthritis.
The accident happened while I was on a zebra crossing. Other people stepped out and I couldn’t see any traffic coming so joined them. Then suddenly a young man on a (legal) e-scooter appeared, after trying to weave through us without slowing down. He misjudged it and my left wrist took the full force of his momentum. I went flying backwards, landing on my back with my only head kept from striking the ground by the thickness of my backpack. I was very lucky. He had the decency to stop and make sure I wasn’t bleeding or concussed … before speeding off.
You can see the X-ray here. The end of my radius bone, on the left, was shattered into maybe 20 pieces. A chunk was also knocked off my ulna, to the right, that isn’t visible from this side. Amazingly the surgeon managed to put it back together into a fully working wrist: “non anatomical but functional” as the fracture doctor said a few weeks later. However, it came with the warning not to be using vibrating machinery like petrol chainsaws even after it finished healing.
I’ve been using chainsaws at Century Wood since I bought it in 2008. Initially I felled the plantation poplars to create the rides and glades, and then odd poplars here and there which were too close to structures. More recently I’ve just been cutting the smaller trees for firewood. Stems a few inches in diameter of hazel, wych elm, alder, and ash. Last year I cut about 8 cubic metres for our own wood stove, and for friends and family when they need some. So not a big commercial operation, but not picking up a few logs for campfires either.
So what to do? Last year I decided to try one of those smaller pruning chainsaws. Part of Ryobi’s 18V range, with a short 8 inch bar. These saws only need one hand to operate, although there is also a grip to rest your left hand on, to keep it out of harms reach away from the running chain. This sounded like a good way of minimising vibration to my left wrist while still allowing me to cut up the firewood stems of hazel etc that are only a few inches thick.
These are four stems I felled last spring but didn’t harvest before my accident. On one of the few dry days this month I tackled them with the Ryobi pruning chainsaw. It worked surprisingly well. I marked up the stems with cuts using my homemade magnetic cutting guide set at 8 inches / 20cm to match the depth of our small wood stove at home. Then I cut up two of the stems into logs and then all four of them.
I have two 5Ah 18V batteries and they each lasted about 30 minutes including marking the stems and throwing the cut logs onto the pile. With the 8A/240V charger I have, they recharge in less than 40 minutes. I have plans to get a Ryobi 12A/110V charger from the US and run it off a 12V-110V inverter and a leisure battery. It would then be possible to keep going all day without interruptions if I wanted.
As far as the speed goes, the pruning chainsaw is clearly much less powerful than the Husqvarna 455 Rancher I was using before. The Ryobi’s rated chain speed is a bit more than a third of the Husky’s, and it felt like it was taking about twice the time to cut each log in practice but a bit less in between cuts since the Ryobi is so much lighter and easier to handle. It also becomes an inert and silent piece of metal and plastic as soon as you take your finger off the trigger.
I also had a walk round the wood and came across the particularly good example of a very bad plantation poplar. Some of the poplars are excellent specimens, tall and straight, but others like this are stunted by losing upper forks and then growing back in this kind of irregular way. Some of them then get shaded out and die, and become excellent standing deadwood, supporting the wood’s Greater Spotted Woodpeckers, the insects they eat, and dead wood fungi.
For years I’ve planned to progressively remove the weak majority of poplars to free up light and space for the natural regeneration of native species. I had assumed I’d be doing it with a chainsaw but I’m now wondering about doing some of them with ringbarking. This will kill the poplars near the base, stop them coming into leaf, create deadwood, and eventually see them collapse. My worry is that they might become too unstable and dangerous and I should do some experiments first to see how it goes. Do they progressively lose branches from the top during storms, or do they suddenly fall over largely intact? Ring barking them is also a final decision: they cannot then be felled safely, certainly by me, once dead. We will have no choice but to wait.
However, for poplars that are near the rides and glades I will definitely need to fell them, and for these I’ve bought a larger 36V Ryobi chainsaw with a chain speed comparable to the Husky but about half the vibration levels. I only plan to use it a few times a year, and I’ll blog about that when I use it for anything serious.