A 60" would be easier - but I gotta tell ya these live oaks (estimated losses from disease exceed 5,000,000) are a hard-headed rock-like pain in the rear.
What's worse is when the customer wants a stump gone - as in nada fe mora. They wish to plant a 2" tree right in the EXACT SAME SPOT!!!!! Backhoe and backache time. I have one old removed giant that's still burning below grade near here - lit it three weeks ago.
It also takes time to grind a live oak - little bites and slow swings. They seem to produce around a cubic yard of chips for every 2" bite. Raking it back over a now foot-below ground stump, there's a three foot pile of cheeps somewhere around eight feet across. The tanic acid from weathering chips keeps anything from growing (except muchrooms and ragweed) for a couple years. Pain in the rear, again. Did Tex or I mention rocks? If we didn't I will again - rocks.
There's an old stump from a reported flood-damaged live oak that sits near Luckenbach, Tx. The tree was swept away in 1864. The stump is as solid as petrified cyprus at the National Park in Arizona (Petrified Tree NM). Think your Vemeer could grind that puppy?
Another issue is "I want it flush with the ground!" Okay, I'll leave the grinding bid out and get it so you can mow over it. I now have the 100ft spool of chain for my 42" bar and my bench punch mounted right next to my beer bottle opener in the back seat. I need to load a portable pressure washer, an air compressor, and some type of scrubbing system to clean the lower reaches of the trunck - again, rock....microscopic and not to mention a hundred years of German thriftiness using the oak as a fence corner post, a longrifle target, and the hollow butt-rotted base as a repository of old horse shoes, axe heads, and twisted nails. "You aren't done with that stump yet?" Ah, no.
Stumps. Humpf.
