BIG BEN PHASE TWO!!!!
It's been over a week since my repot/cutback and nothing has died back. Good.
Now it's time to carve out the dead wood and saw spots and taper the trunk pieces.
It was 90 degrees and 87% humidity...a good day to work on a ficus.
My wife was home so she took some shots of me carving. All the work was done with a Makita die grinder using a Samurai, a Ninja, a couple different carbide burrs and a sanding flap wheel.
When doing a bunch of carving like this be sure to wear eye protection and a breathing mask.
It went excellent except for that couple seconds where a branch got caught in my sanding flap wheel and it wound it up real quick! and ripped it off the tree!
Luckily it was just a small one!
I had to carve some live tissue away that I really didn't want to but needed to get a good taper between the large right side trunk carving and a healing over branch below it. I needed to re-wound and carve the healed torn off branch and run the carving together. You can see that partially healed branch hole in the early photos before I carved.
Everyone has different ideas about carving different types of trees. On some types ( and ficus is one) when I carve, and carve into an old healed area I always re-wound that edge of that area to induce further healing. Trident maples are another fgood tree to practice this on. NOTHING heals over like a trident and reinjuring a healed cut often helps it heal over more completely.
I also completely removed a partially healed large stub on the left side trunk.