My buddy Kevin had the same thing happen back in 2019, his trailer caught fire over in Morganton and the sentimental stuff he kept in one of those cheap Sentry safes came out looking like a melted hockey puck. He told me the ONLY thing that survived was a laminated copy of his kids' birth certificates, and the cash inside was just gone, black and crumbly. When he finally got a real fire safe, a friend at the fire station told him to look for the UL 350 rating or better, because most cheap boxes only survive 15 minutes at like 1200 degrees. He ended up going with a used one off Craigslist, an old Amsec, and paid like $60 for it. It's heavy as hell but after that, he swears he'll never cheap out on that again.

Feeling that weight is the whole game, isnt it? I noticed the same thing when I switched from small jobs to anything with real girth, and its kinda the same with learning to carry a heavy cooler up stairs or judging how much a loaded wheelbarrow will tip. You can read all the charts you want, but the real lesson is in how the tree shifts when you make that first cut, like it tells you right away if you guessed wrong. Sounds like that failed limb taught you more than a hundred videos could, honestly. What did you change first, the direction of the notch or the depth of your back cut?