Rigging Failures

tophopper

tophopper

The resident asshole
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As a spin off to rsky's rigging question thread. Im curious what types of rigging failures ya'll have experienced?

Me? I cant remember ever breaking a rigging line (in a typical rigging scenario), but have broken out a gin point or three in my time. I think once I overloaded a small 1" webbing sling once and broke that, which was a major oversight on my part as it was grossly under rated for the task.

Has anyone broken a bull rope that wasn't under-rated or way overdue it's retirement?
If so, how, why and where did it break?

Considering the rope should be the weakest component in the rigging system, I feel confident about my ability to design a safe system as Ive never had a rope fail.
 
I broke one once. I told the fellow it would probably break, but he said to go ahead and do it anyway, to finish up quicker. There weren't really any targets anyway that would be struck, it just needed to be bouqueted to keep the top from hitting a fence.
 
I broke a 5/8 bull rope jammed the porty right before the block hit the ground. Snapped it right off at the marl hitch. It was a 3 ft piece if I recall 35+ dbh. Trying to control the roll as it was on a hillside. Luckily it just speared down and stayed.
 
  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
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arborworks1 said:
I broke a 5/8 bull rope jammed the porty right before the block hit the ground. Snapped it right off at the marl hitch. It was a 3 ft piece if I recall 35+ dbh. Trying to control the roll as it was on a hillside. Luckily it just speared down and stayed.
Click to expand...

When you say "block hit the ground" do you mean the piece of wood being rigged down?

35'dbh is crazy huge. You cant really NB a piece much shorter than 2 1/2 to 3 feet either. Would you say now looking back that a bigger diameter bull rope should have been used?
 
I once broke a 1/2 inch steel choker by not rigging it high enough in an old growth western red cedar I was tasked to pull over, roots and all, on a fish habitat project. This was early in the days of this sort of work, never done anywhere before we pioneered the technique to the best of my knowlege, and we were still learning what we could get away with and what was doomed to failure.

I knew we'd broken the top out of a similar sized cedar a few days before by going too high...cedar is not so strong as the Dougs we were usually lining over. When that top exploded it was terrifying, scary bad with all the chunks of wood shrapnel flying at least a hundred feet about.

So I only went up about 50 feet in this 48+" red cedar to hang the choker and MA rigging block.

The resulting snarl of rigging cable and block, singing through the air and crashing into other trees was twice as nasty as the top failure from earlier.

Only time I made that mistake...I got better at judging things as we went along.
 
What doesn't kill us makes us smarter, hopefully.

I've snapped a few bull ropes trying to pull a stuck truck or two out of the mud, but never in a rigging scenario.
 
tophopper said:
Me? I cant remember ever breaking a rigging line (in a typical rigging scenario), but have broken out a gin point or three in my time. I think once I overloaded a small 1" webbing sling once and broke that, which was a major oversight on my part as it was grossly under rated for the task.

Has anyone broken a bull rope that wasn't under-rated or way overdue it's retirement?
If so, how, why and where did it break?
Click to expand...

No here also on the rope, a gin pole yes, did manage to miss the target
 
Burnham said:
I once broke a 1/2 inch steel choker by not rigging it high enough in an old growth western red cedar I was tasked to pull over, roots and all, on a fish habitat project. This was early in the days of this sort of work, never done anywhere before we pioneered the technique to the best of my knowlege, and we were still learning what we could get away with and what was doomed to failure.

I knew we'd broken the top out of a similar sized cedar a few days before by going too high...cedar is not so strong as the Dougs we were usually lining over. When that top exploded it was terrifying, scary bad with all the chunks of wood shrapnel flying at least a hundred feet about.

So I only went up about 50 feet in this 48+" red cedar to hang the choker and MA rigging block.

The resulting snarl of rigging cable and block, singing through the air and crashing into other trees was twice as nasty as the top failure from earlier.

Only time I made that mistake...I got better at judging things as we went along.
Click to expand...

Go big or go home! I can only imagine that mess.
 
After we caught our breath and untangled the backlash I climbed that SOB again and made it bend to my will...no doubt the salmon were cheering as she hit the river :D.
 
Just gunned it. It took a few hits I was impressed I thought for sure it was going to break on the first hit but no it was the sixth or seventh hit and it broke mid line. This was back in collage when I did it so I did not have access to a dyno. It would have been interesting to see the numbers. The line was 1/2" sta-set and a ram half ton.
 
I've never had a rope break in a lifting or lowering scenario, but I've busted a rigging point once. I was using a chainsaw winch to pick a whole mess of virgina creeper wrapped around some poplar logs, and the stem to which it was tied broke, the rope slid down to the next lowest union about 4' down, and the piece of wood landed about 3" away from a concrete form fountain. Close one. The problem occurred because I did not calculate the strength of the rigging point properly.

I've seen 1/2 inch 16 strand break and go flying by a coworkers nose as we were using it to skid logs with a skidsteer. We switched to chain tootsweet.
 
I broke a 3/4" rigging strap on our block chuncking down a green Cottonwood. The chunk was well withing the working load limitation, and I (this time anyway!) didn't have any undue slack in the line.

The strap was simply too old... just the cycle to failure thing or whatever...

I will say that I saw my foreman bust out a very big lead that we where rigging to in a London Plane. I was running ropes, and I did a good job. That one scared the heck out of us both. The piece he had taken on it wasn't even that big. That one had us scratching our heads for a WHILE. We ended up attributing it to the stick having to take the load from a weird angle that the tree wasn't biologically set-up to take (well what else were we going to say?) but the whole thing was just too weird. It was in the summer, (Seattle area) and it was pretty hot. (The transpiration thing???)

Guess you can never be too careful.
 
Never broke a lowering line, but I've sure busted some steel cables and rigging. When you start doing cable logging, the forces go off the scale compared to tree rigging. We've ripped whole trees out the ground, snapped them in half at 18'' dia, torn anchor stumps out the ground, snapped 1" cables and slings, broke haul ins and haul outs. What a summer of education that was :D
 
I've never broken anything, but I have come as close as one possibly can.

We had a very large beech at the edge of a forest leaning over a mental hospital with rot in the butt area to take down.
As Richard went up to set the rigging, he found that a black woodpecker ( about 3" larger than your pileated!) had hollowed out the main stem, making it unusable for a rigging point.

So we decided to reduce as much weight as we could, working with a lower point and then pull the tree away from the building into the forest with a skidder.

The skidder was out of visual range so my former partner kept contact via cell phone.

I told him that I'd finish the backcut and hold the tree on wedges, then signal for him to let the skidder pull.

When I was ½way through the cut the whole tree suddenly shook violently and the ground jumped.
Scared the shit out of me, really.

My idiot partner had forgotten his instruktions and panicked, calling " pull" to the skidder.

The rope didn't break, but after we'd finally got the tree safely on the ground, It couldn't be coiled up, it was melted in the core and completely stiff.

If that rope had broken, the tree would most likely have snapped forward, breaking off at the rotten butt and split the building in two.

About a month later while logging the guy left a hungup oaktree hanging over a public road and went home.
I came by early next morning and found the tree laying in the road.

Then we kicked him out!
 
What is it with damn fool people who start to pull to early?! it used to drive me round the bend, you'd tell them 'DONT PULL UNTIL I SIGNAL!', and lo and behold, your half way through a back cut and the whole tree barberchairs and rips out the ground.

Jeez guys, dont you get it? I WANT TO BE AWAY FROM THE BASE OF THE TREE WHEN YOU PULL!!!

Its one of the reasons I first bought my own skidder, so only my well trained guys could do the pulling.
 
Yesterday I had to flop a spar next to a house. I had a tag line in it and the guys started pulling as soon as I began to cut my notch. :lol:
 
Never broke a rigging line. Crane sling once:cry: and an old piece of climbing line trying to spin a log off a logging road. I was fairly certain it was going to happen
 
Snapped a relatively new 9mm cable when pulling with a backhoe. No damage beyond that after it happened. Pissed me off.
 
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