before arborist blocks....

T

treeajnin

how did climbers rig down the wood before arborist blocks? Now I know about using a half hitch when u have a stub to hold it from sliding down the trunk but what if there was no branches for like 50 feet and you had to lower sections of wood to avoid a target?

-newschool climber :)
 
My arbo work started in earnest in the early/mid 70's. Marv taught me pretty well. Natural crotch rigging and trunk wraps were the tools of the day. along with hemp/manila three strand.

When it came time to work down the trunk short chunks were jump-cut. Most of the time a rope was tied on, face/back cut or bypass cuts. I learned to pull the rope at just the right time to initiate the fall. Too much and the chunk would spin and bounce wild. Just enough and it would fall and drop dead. Marv was a rough task master.

I never learned to use a butt hitch until early 80's after starting my company. A butt hitch is actually a marl. It has to be set carefully so that the rope chokes onto the spar and at the same time the chunk can be lowered on itself. By the time I learned the marl I was using blocks and slings.
 
Couple older guys told me they would hitch a rope to the spar like you would a sling and just pass the rope between the sling and the tree and rig rope on rope. They said it destroyed ropes obviously, gotta love friction
 
As Tom mentioned butt-hitching. Like a marl around the trunk such that the working end will fall over the lay line and create a "false crotch". While it works keep a block handy and use it.
 
Oxman posted some good photos or maybe it was even a video of lowering large chunks off of notches in the trunk. It's been 5 or 6 years ago though.
 
A bunch of years of ago, I was taking down some sweet gums and only had a long sling on the block..
Big Jon was in the hooks... he dropped the block and carved a few notches with face and then laced it up old old school.. He had it down pat... no fooling around...
 
in this video they are actually rigging down the spar without using any blocks for the large wood, all natural crotched...

start around the 7:30 mark if you wanna just see the big wood rigging where they use notches cut into the trunk to retain the line.


hopefully we all can ignore the laundry list of safety violations and just look at the traditional rigging they got going on.
 
SRTsteve860 said:
in this video they are actually rigging down the spar without using any blocks for the large wood, all natural crotched...
.
Click to expand...

Begs the question...why? Too cheap to buy a block? Seems easy access for a crane too. Got to choose the right tool for the job is what this vid shows imo. That marl could slide down into the lanyard/buckstrap and it would get ugly. Not representative of work in the late 60's early 70's I saw or did.

I did a huge 3' dia straight stem pine on an embankment a couple of weeks ago where the embankment ran steep downhill into the side of a house. Did a verticle speed line and used bungies to retain the knot (r bowline) so slack would not allow the piece to get off at any time. Chunk pieces probably weighed around 1k ea. according to log chart.

Getting big fat wood off a tree and falling into a block is a challenge no matter what technology is at hand and is not judicious to hinge it over in my opinion. I generally do a slant cut and 3/4 way thru put 3 hard twigs in the cut spaced in the middle and both sides to not get pinched. Don't cut too deep of a slant so when the piece is finished all way thru it slides off like on roller skates and not like greased lightning. You can drop into a block that way...but not something easily done.

Also imo you can get 3 short fat chunks off ...often into a safe non damaging dropzone, much quicker than you can get that 3 piece log removed all at once (that could not fall into a safe drop zone so you were made to lower it) with my technique of sliding them off pretty much any side of the stem you want to make them go....and you don't have the rigging time and you don't have to tie up a ground man. And tying up a gm is a big deal to a guy like me that has run over 40 years with just me in the tree and one gm.
 
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the first top i ever roped out was thru a marl, no slings or anything. my old employer was "training" me and was running ropes. he took a wrap on the stem, and told me the moment the top starts going over, just let go of the saw (on a lanyard of course) and get my hands on the stem, otherwise i might take a blow to the chest and break ribs.

needless to say it was a hell of a ride for the first top i ever roped out. one of my early moments where i was thought, "is this tree climbing gig really for me....?" (but fckin a right it is)
His "training" of using the techniques hes familiar with from his time in the field usually sounded like those commercials you see for medications on TV. "This is what you want to do for this situation, but these are the possible outcomes if things dont go smoothly. Piece of tree swinging into knee caps, stem to the chest, smoked out rigging line, gaffing out..." etc.
 
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