Another biggie...

rbtree

Climbing Up
Joined
Jun 22, 2005
Messages
1,924
And fun, too.....

The job was to remove a large, triple trunked gangly big leaf maple, (one large lead had fallen across the earthen roof of the underground home) The GRCS winch made the job go smoothly, along with our excellent crew. We left a 25 foot habitat snag, which saved a couple hours of wood cutting,as the trunk was close to 5 feet dbh...
Got the tree done in about 7 hours with a crew of four. We were able to crash out much of the back side of the tree, onto a downslope and hide the brush in the woods. Had to swing much of the wood uphill to the LZ per the customer's request.

The setting was above a meandering waterway..(wetlands) and overlooking the snow covered Cascade Mt's Still 2-4 inches of snow around, but none in the work zone, thankfully.

Here's a slide show...video to follow...
Dave subs for me, but I'm bummed I didn't ask him to don his helmet.....doesn't look very profeshunul.....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbtree/sets/72157615171833380/show/
 
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  • #2
Here's the video...

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Man, on those big ones you just gotta wail away at it until it starts to look like you're getting somewhere! Good job!
 
Not bad at all for one day Roger!

Nice rope work!

For your crew's sake I hope the wood stayed!

jomoco
 
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  • #10
Not bad at all for one day Roger!

Nice rope work!

For your crew's sake I hope the wood stayed!

jomoco

Yup!! easy 4 cords of it, I reckon. plus the snag, another 3 cords...glad that stayed up!
 
Wonderful pictures...once the coffee jitters calmed down the video was excellent. The roping was good to watch.
 
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  • #12
Really nice rope work.


On one of the logs with lean that we wanted to swing uphill, (at 2.55 minutes) we should have had a tag line, or a different cut, perhaps with some GRCS pretension. Dave only made one cut, and it didn't swing around. So, Brian was worried it could come back at Dave, so it let it down fast. It ended up on the slope. The customer was OK with tossing it and a bit more wood over the bank, past the flat area of the septic line running to the tank further off in the woods.

Dave is a great climber, confident, and super fast, but seems to take a few shortcuts sometimes.

On that big tulip last week, he was too lazy to climb up and get a redirect, when it was time to drop the section it was tied to, So, he simply ran the binered rope up to the sling and pulley where it caught. Then lowered the section off the main block. But the sling had been handling downward loads, and now, the upward force pulled it right off. The section fell, missing the house and Brian by quite a ways, but that was a close call, and unacceptable, in my opinion. I saw what he was doing, and didn't think of that happening, mainly didn't like the rope against the light pulley. (Section prolly only weighed 150-225 lb, but.......)
 
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  • #13
Wonderful pictures...once the coffee jitters calmed down the video was excellent. The roping was good to watch.
Most of the clips were shot at 320x240, till I noticed it and moved to 640x480.
The camera is my nifty Canon Pro 1, which I got on ebay for $55 to replace my old stolen one. Unlike my newer A650, which has grundge inside the lens elements, it doesn't adjust the light settings, focus or allow zoom during filming....
 
On one of the logs with lean that we wanted to swing uphill, (at 2.55 minutes) we should have had a tag line, or a different cut, perhaps with some GRCS pretension. Dave only made one cut, and it didn't swing around. So, Brian was worried it could come back at Dave, so it let it down fast. It ended up on the slope. The customer was OK with tossing it and a bit more wood over the bank, past the flat area of the septic line running to the tank further off in the woods.

Dave is a great worker, confident, and super fast, but seems to take a few shortcuts sometimes.

On that big tulip last week, he was too lazy to climb up and get a redirect, when it was time to drop the section it was tied to, So, he simply ran the binered rope up to the sling and pulley where it caught. Then lowered the sectioan off the main block. But the sling had been handling downward loads, and now, the upward force pulled it right off. The section fell, missing the house and Brian by quite a ways, but that was a close call, and unacceptable, in my opinion. I saw what he was doing, and didn't think of that happening, mainly didn't like the rope against the light pulley. (Section prolly only weighed 150-225 lb, but.......

As long as you learn how easy it is to avoid such close calls prior to letting them happen, then it's educational rather than just another close call.

Props to you Roger, for being willing to share your lessons with us so we can all learn from them and perhaps even reduce the # getting hurt in our industry.

I dang near killed my best friend about 6 weeks ago zipping fairly large euc wood down a long 150 foot long speedline to him at the winch control of my tooltruck.

The problem wasn't so much the uncontrolled speed so much as it was my speedline line termination point below where bull line met winch cable hook slowly got closer to my tooltruck as I got lower in the tree into bigger faster wood.

So rather than taking the time to let out more cable and choke up on the bull line to keep the loads getting too close to my truck when I should have, I zipped a big one down that hit the termination point only about 20 feet from my buddy at the winch control, it stretched that bull line big time and danced up right in his face trying to reach him and only missing by about 6 inches!

My buddy Ron has nerves of steel to stay on the winch control taking in slack the way he did rather than running, because if he hadn't it would have hit my truck for sure.

This is the exact tree and setup it happened on Roger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4hcNYEoXdA

All my fault, and something I will never allow to happen again.

Way too close a call to ever repeat!

jomoco
 
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  • #15
Yikes.

Years ago, a friend, no longer climbing, but part of the lineboss.com ascender/descender gadget, was zipping wood on a cable to his aluminum bodied chip truck. Dented it pretty badly......

Yesterday, I was 30 feet away and watching Dave when he dumped the last top of the maple (seen in the backlit shot) onto the woodpile. It broke apart, and an 8 inch long shard about 2-3" wide whizzed by me and landed 8 feet away. That would have smarted!
 
Beautiful location and nice job. You guys seem like you are having fun. That's the way it should be.
 
No doubt , that was alot of tree work in 7 hours.Wonder if the climber was sore the next day .
 
Is this group employed by you Roger, or are you peers, partners? Does this group always work together?
 
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  • #23
Is this group employed by you Roger, or are you peers, partners? Does this group always work together?

Yes, save for Luis...we were short a guy. He's only worked a coupla times before.

And Dave subs, now.
 
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