Rigging with a 3 man crew

[Mark Chisholm]

Yesterday my Father asked a few of us to work with him on a contract job that is getting close to falling behind schedule. Only four of us were working, but we had a big loader and tree-eating machine with one operator ( a friend of ours)there too.

The job involves a lot of felling and some rigging around wires and such. It's on Fort Dix Army base where they are re-routing a highway for homeland security. The Army engineers are watching us all day and they have very specific things they want. One thing that makes the job way more difficult than it has to is they don't want any debris to fall behind the clearing line. Some trees are standing within 3 feet of this line. So we end up rigging a lot of the trees down that could be felled into the woods with very little damage to the woods.

My Father worked with one guy w/ the big loader felling trees on one side of a road. He would fell them, hook the tree with a chain and the machine would take it to where we could get the truck and chipper. The two of them chipped over 3 truckloads of chips! The old guy is a worker. He stayed out there until 6:30 last night.

Me and the other two guys (Rob and Rob) worked on the trees that couldn't be felled. Here's some pics.

This first one shows an Oak that was cornered in by wires. The stump in the foreground was a Gum that we pulled into the Oak on lead at a time.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

Here's a shot of the rigging point. I had used two blocks so that I could use the strength of the larger leader to the right, and re-direct it away from the wires into the smaller leader(left) when we pulled the whole leaders in. Then I needed a little more height to balance the Oak limbs so that they didn't tip over and into the wires. I just used the natural crotch for that.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

Lower the limbs, hook 'em to the tractor and drive them to the chipper.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

Away they go.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

Here's a clump of Gum trees that needed to be rope down.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

As you can see, they were down a pretty steep hill and the chipper had to be parked down the road a ways.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

Tie 'em, cut 'em and crank 'em in. Then I would go in and slash cut 'em off of the stump.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

Hook 'em to the tractor and lower 'em along side the wires.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

The width of our lowering zone was just about the size of the larger leads. We had to lower everything with care.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

This row of Oak trunks in front of the Gums were topped out via a speedline across the wire. Our tractor blew a hose, so there were only two of us. I sent the brush into the road and we chipped the pile while we waited for the tractor to get fixed.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

The larger leads (trees) needed some more convincing to go away from the wires. I wedged them over while Rob cranked 'em in.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

I rigged these trees down using two leaders to support the loads. When we hung the big stuff off of them, the would touch each other at the top.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

This little Kubota sure works its heart out for us.

 

[Mark Chisholm]

These big leaders ended up burning the lowering line sheath even while going slow. That winch was hot to touch for about 1/2 an hour.

Alright, that's enough. I told some friends I would post some pics and there. That took a while to do. /forum/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

 

[rborist1]

Mark,

Nice pics as usual. What kind of weight do you estimate the large leaders were?

 

[Mark Chisholm]

Craig, if they were in a full hang from the start, I'd say that the smaller ones were 2500-3000# and the larger could've been near double that.

 

[rborist1]

Impressive.......You gotta luv that crane in a box! /forum/images/graemlins/rock.gif

 

[Mark Chisholm]

Yeah I do. You also gotta love high-tech rigging components. They make this type of work possible.

 

[Oxman]

The series of pics with expanded captions goes a long ways towards giving the viewer an idea of what the job presented. Nice use of full-height lowering to save a lot of intermediate steps. The photos almost made it seem like we were there.

Smoking the gear is a way of testing the capabilities of the resources you have available. Slightly exceeding the rigging capacity lets you know what you can get away with next time. Kinda like a teenager doing 4 wheel brodies to aquaint himself with the handling properties of his SUV.

Only 3 guys (2, when the tractor hose was being fixed) caused some brain cells to figger out what shortcuts could allow less labor to accomplish the job that would ordinarily require more people & gear.

Using the 2 lowering points reminds me of Graeme McMahon's rigging down big Euc's over the sculpture garden in Australia. I believe he used 2 separate static ropes, however, to more precisely control the drop, since the tall height of the trees would have introduced excess stretch and fouled up the close tolerances amongst the obstacles in the drop zone. The sculptures are actually carved into the tree stumps, thus being immovable.

Be nice if someone could dig up his website link at Sherbrooke Tree Services. Graeme was one of the climbers in the Bogachiel Spruce during the Moonlight Madness climb. He also contributed to Australia's tree care safety guidelines handbook. "Working Safely with Amenity Trees"

 

[Mark Chisholm]

[ QUOTE ]
Smoking the gear is a way of testing the capabilities of the resources you have available. Slightly exceeding the rigging capacity lets you know what you can get away with next time.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's funny that you say that. That's almost exactly what I said to Rob (on the ropes) about the whole scene. The exposure to damage and injuries was minimal as long as we were all aware of the worst case scenerio. After we talked about how to be prepared and safe in that event, we could relax, do the job and save some energy/time. And when the exposure goes up on another job, we can reflect on these types of jobs and scale the procedures down a notch or two.