Hang around here long enough and you might become a logger. Traditional cutting techniques that utilize a hinge built with the falling cuts often pull fibers out of the butt log. That is not a problem with blocking logs, but for grade, and especially for veneer logs, fiber-pull costs you a bunch of money. Loggers who are cutting veneer logs make a different set of cuts for the most valuable trees. There is no hinge to guide the tree as it falls, and there may be more collateral damage because of that, but the bottom of the tree has no fiber-pull damage.
You fall a tree this way by bore cutting under the butt, but you leave root swells to support the tree. Vertical cuts are made on the compressed side of the tree to sever the root swells, and then cuts are made on the tensioned side to let the tree fall. That tree may do unpredictable things when it is detached from the stump, so rapid footwork is advisable.
Cutting any tree larger than sapling size without building a hinge is dangerous, making your falling tree an unguided missile. All of the smashed logger accidents I have seen were stumps with no hinge.
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