top friction

[Gary Prentice]

I really dislike seeing ropes running over one another like that.

[Mick Dempsey]

4 minutes ago, Gary Prentice said:

I really dislike seeing ropes running over one another like that.

Why?

[Gary Prentice]

A hangover from when ropes were made from a lot lower melting point materials. But saying that even modern ropes will glaze with rope to rope contact under heavy loads/fast descents.

[Mick Dempsey]

Fast descents are modern thing, everything must “run” for the cameras ? 

 

 

[Gary Prentice]

Wrong term, rapid lowering of load (i.e heavier than expected/inattentive or inexperience groundir)

[Mick Dempsey]

 

2 minutes ago, Gary Prentice said:

Wrong term, rapid lowering of load (i.e heavier than expected/inattentive or inexperience groundir)

 To use cricket terminology...

 

You cannot set a field for bad bowling.

 

If the rope gets fooked, no big deal, it’s cheap enough.

 

[Gary Prentice]

No big deal Mick, just my personal philosophy of if you have habits, always make them good ones. Unless they involve bikes, alcohol or women. 

[MattyF]

The climber in Vespasians vid .. the legendary Graeme Mcmahon

Top friction lessons the forces on the spar , if your using a friction device on the bottom your doubling the forces at the top... I have a safe block but pretty much only use it for defective trees , most of the rigging I do I will use a block pulley as it’s usually in tight situations and the ability to pull branches off targets or pre tension lines in necessary.
I did a job recently though where it was a proper hike to the job a big tree over a wall and none of us could be bothered to carry anything!!it felt invigorating using natural crotch rigging for the first time in years but worrying about the damage on my £150 rigging line !

[Vespasian]

Some of those vids of his scare the crap out of me..   

 

and yes, when you only have a spanner everything looks like a nut...  if you have all the rigging equipment, then I dare say theres a feeling you aught be seen using it..   

[James Atkinson]

For whatever reason we do a lot of big tree Rigging. Not because I’m some hot shot it just seems to be what we get asked to quote. In my personal opinion friction at the top via natural crotches is all well and good on smooth trees or small trees, but as soon as you go through a few folks the friction produced is a real pain in the ass for groundsmen. It doesn’t take a lot to become annoying pulling the line back up to the climber, even not being able to lower the branch. The other issue is without pulleys it’s near on impossible to be able to lift or pre-tension branches, which is kinda important when removing trees. We use a ArbPro Which bollard similar to a GRCS, hands down the best thing in big tree rigging I have ever used. Again this would be pretty useless with natural forks. We don’t have 200ft Eucalyptus trees that grow straight up in the uk allowing us to tie the branches close to the trunk and just cut them off, our trees are often as wide as they are tall, over a green house, shed, house, fence, baby’s, and roads. Basically I’m trying to say...,we need the shiny stuff