GRCS truck mount

[emr]

We are going to get one made up by a welder friend of mine. I notice the one that you can buy from Good can be used in two different orientations. One with the winch horizontally like it would be on the tree and another where the winch is vertical. I was just wondering which way is more practical? I see us using this mainly as a winch for pulling loads up hills or for pulling trees over. I really don't see using it as an anchor point for serious rigging. So what do you all think? Should we just get it make to be used one way or is it necessary to switch from vertical to horizontal?

 

[murphy4trees]

I'd be happy to sell you mine.. Its never been used ... I think I scavanged a few parts off it, but it has never been out of the house since 2004 when I got it. I'll have to look around for it.. PM me.. It has the vertical orientation..

 

[emr]

Thanks for the offer but my buddy has already started making it so I would feel kind of bad telling him to stop now. We decided to make it work both vertically and horizontally but just a different design than what is sold. I will post pics once its done.

 

[Ax-Man]

Are you finished with it yet?? I recently made one using an old mounting plate that I couldn't fix for doing tree work. I just made mine to stay in the horizontal position and just forgot about the vertical as I didn't see a big use for the vertical position for an anchor point.

I made mine with a shackle in front of the mount for extra MA. I'll be using mine for either pulling trees over or pulling small stumps. I have already tried it on a few small stumps . Much easier and faster than using those clunky come-alongs or chain hoists. One thing I noticed right off the bat when using the mount was that with the added height of the mount the springs of the truck come into play more for some extra leverage.

 

[emr]

I don't know how far along it is. I dropped it off and told him that I just wanted it done within a month. That still gives him another week or so. He is a poo welder but he is just doing this on the side. I guess his union hall has a full work shop that the members are free to use. He said they have all the machines necessary to do this. My buddy works full time and has two young kids and has a property that he leases out so I try not to be going him too much about this. I will get some pics posted when it's completed. I am very curious to see how it comes out. He made a mini porty out of stainless that has worked perfectly for us so I know he can do nice work.

 

[emr]

Here is the almost finished product. We are going to give it a try and see if it needs any modifications. If not, it's going to get a paint job and we will be good to go. I am pretty excited. This think really turned out nice I think.

 

[Burnham]

There's a lot of leverage on your hitch mount available there...best to have the load straight off to the rear.

 

[emr]

Yes sir, that's pretty much how I plan on using it.

 

[Burnham]

Should work like a charm, long as you aren't dragging the truck around too much .

 

[emr]

If the truck starts to move I will just put my fat arse up in the bed to stop it.

 

[Burnham]

It could happen...I recall a story about a timber show clown, he had a "drunk logger" spar climbing bit that ended with him "falling" off from standing on the top of the spar and riding a rope down to the ground, that was anchored to the back end of a full sized pickup parked uphill from the base of the spar. One time his truck wouldn't start, so he borrowed a smaller truck, and got bunged up pretty bad when his weight hit the belly of the rope, yanked the truck closer to the spar and he hit the ground a glancing blow.

 

[ClimbingFool]

you might want to mount a detachable swing arm off that hitch ? might prevent it from bending under heavy up hill pulls. Look s really clean other wise.

 

[sotc]

What are the pig tails for?

 

[emr]

They were in the pic of Good's version so he put them on mine. I suppose they won't get used much by me.

 

[CurSedVoyce]

I would want a front receiver on my truck for that as well. My dad has one and man oh man is it nice to see what is going on out the front window when using it!

 

[Ax-Man]

For better or worse here is a few pics of my homemade GRCS truck mount that I made last year. It is typical of my homemade fabrication projects. Get the project done but seldom follow through with primer and paint. The pins that hold this all together aren't in place because I forgot to bring the camera for the job we were doing today using this . I just assembled it for the pics but I think you guy's can figure it out easy enough. My first attempt at building this came out similar to EMR's . It was just to low to the ground for me and figured I might bend it up so I redid it to give it some height and additional bracing which might be on the overkill side

Today we had to winch some decent size willow limbs that had rotted at the base of a multi-leader piece of #### willow that had fallen into a pond. We were going to just use my grapple truck to get them out but a soft spot in the field changed that idea real quick. Our chipper has a winch but I wasn't about to chance getting that stuck along with the chip truck so we had to punt and change our game plan.

We decided to give the homemade GRCS a try along with the drill and generator for speed instead of hand cranking which would be painfully slow. Worked much better than I thought it would. I basically built this for pulling small stumps and to pull trees over when need be which it does quite nicely. Today we played hard ball with it winching out those willow limbs and wood up a slight rock strewn incline up onto flat dry ground. It worked quite well, much better than I thought it would using some old True Blue rope like a cable. We didn't do so well using a 1:1 pull and quickly switched to a 2:1 rig which is why that shackle is mounted to the front of it to serve as an anchor point. This worked much better but still needed a little more power so we rigged up a 3:1 and that did the trick. I would hade loved to see what my 5:1 could do with this Harkin winch and the drill.

Like all winching tasks when it comes to trees it is best if you can keep the buts from digging in the ground. That was our only drawback today because we couldn't get a pulley up high and in the right place to keep the buts from digging in the ground or into those big rocks. I think I may have found a way to make some kind of little boom to fit on the end of the truck mount to see how that would work. I am also anious to see how this set-up works with my log arch to pull some small logs out of our timber if I ever get a chance to play before the weather gets bad.

 

[Ax-Man]

I messed up on the pics somehow. Here is another pic with the drill we use and the generator to power it. It felt good today to see this stuff get some use because these tools don't see as much action like they did a few years ago due to to this slowdown in the economy.

 

[MasterBlaster]

I give it two thumbs up... I like it!

 

[Ax-Man]

Thanks , Butch It is definately different looking but the darn thing does work.

 

[MasterBlaster]

And that's all that matters!