Jim Kasper, right, and a co-worker conduct a pull test to determine the structural integrity of the tree at the tie-in-point. But how useful is it? Does the TIP pull test actually make sense? Photo courtesy of the author. There [...]

They have names aplenty: knuckle booms, grapple booms, grapple saws, grapple cranes, truck-mounted knuckle booms and knuckle-boom grapple saws, among others. We’ll refer to them as “grapple saws” for this article. Whatever you call them, when you conjure an image [...]