Nice — do you have any pictures of what it looked like under the tape? Our trees are of similar size so I’m curious how you were able to get under bark, and what the growth was like.
I don’t but I will take pictures on the next one for you. I have more to do! I make the cut with a grafting knife and lift up the bark similar to t budding. If the bark isn’t slipping a chisel out a square and then make a vertical cut in the middle. Secure with a nail then parafilm and tape
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I’d love pics or a video. All I’ve seen shows much larger trees with deeper bark.
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I should have posted here
I, also, live in Eastern MA, and had the same problem. It occurs to me that i have a random apple rootstock i bought years ago, decided i didn’t have any use for, and potted up. It lives in the shade, and has never gotten very large. But this afternoon I’m going to see if it’s large enough to use as a bridge graft here. I’ll also look around and see if i can find any volunteer apple seedlings. That’s what both the scion and the root were on my damaged tree. Maybe there’s one i can dig up on my property. Or on the priority of a neighbor who wouldn’t mind my removing a junk seedling in their lawn.
For what it’s worth, i didn’t protect this tree. The ones I’ve protected look fine. I’m a big fan of aluminum window screen. I used to be able to get it free from a hardware storm that fixed screened doors and windows, but it closed. 
I still have some, though. I’ve also used hardware cloth. Both work, in my experience. But i can cut the window screen with kitchen shears and affix it with an ordinary office stapler. The hardware cloth needs to be cut with tin snips, bit by bit. I need to protect my hands from getting cut while i do that. And then i tie it in place with either baling wire or zip ties. It ends up looking nicer, but it’s a ton more work.
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Welp, it’s not large enough. It’s not tall enough, and also, the two twigs emerging from the root are small, and probably wouldn’t carry a lot of nutrition. And I went looking for random seedlings to dig up, but they were all deer-eaten to the ground over the winter. Many are sprouting and will probably recover, but they are currently about 4 inches tall.
Should I go to a big box nursery and buy whatever small apple tree I can find, and sacrifice that?
Alternatively, I found a small shoot growing by the roots of the parent tree. That tree was also chewed on by rabbits over the winter, but has a better chance of surviving, because there’s a strip up one side that was protected by a dead branch, close enough to the main leader that the rabbits couldn’t get in there. (The dead branch was a competing leader that failed, and died.) From the foliage, the small shoot is coming from the same roots. It’s also on my neighbor’s property, but they let me cut grafting wood, and I bet they’d let me dig out the shoot. (If I can – the ground is very rocky there. And by “rocky”, I means it’s mostly ledge with some cracks the tree is growing in.) So maybe I should just start over with an own-rooted version, and protect it more carefully.
There are a lot of seedling crabs around that are too large to consider moving. This is the ONLY ONE that was eaten by rabbits. I guess it is not only prettier than the others, but tastes better, too.
I went out to do more bridge grafting but the remaining trees were fully dead or had no graft-able material. I followed the videos posted earlier in this thread though if you want to know the process. Best of luck!
Wow, dead from just this year?
Yea the damage was extensive and we had sub zero temps with almost constant wind so it was quite desiccating to these younger trees
Not being able to find anything on roots that was suitable, I cut off a long branch from the rootstock and grafted both ends of it, one below most of the damage, and the other above.
Rubber bands weren’t going to hold these pieces together.
I nailed the bottom to the base of the tree to hold it in place, covered everything with parafilm, and tied it in place with kitchen twine, so i wouldn’t put too much stress on it when i grafted the top. I tried to nail in the top, too, but it was too small, and i just made a mess of it. Oh well, maybe that exposed extra cambium. After trying a few more things, i ended up just wrapping it really tightly with parafilm, and then tying some kitchen twine over it.
I guess time will tell.
I got permission from the neighbor to dig out the “small shoot”, but it turned out to be emerging from a beefy root (branch?) running along the rocky ledge it’s growing out of. Also, something ate most of the top growth. 
Not that it mattered, immediately, but that might have been insurance for the parent the.
So… I’m not going to prune out the growth from my stump this year, and if the top dies, I’ll try starting over with a new graft. I think the neighbor’s tree will survive, and there’s now enough of it growing into my yard that i can just take some scion wood from my property. (Not that i think the neighbor would object, since it’s really hard to even get to that corner of her yard from the part she uses. But it’s simpler not to have to coordinate.)