A bit of forestry.

[Mark Wileman]

Nice job, if you need extra hands let me know!

[andy cobb]

On 7 June 2018 at 21:50, slack ma girdle said:

I was hoping to set up a push/pull set up with my twin drum winch, but because of the narrow track and having to ofset the winch there is not enough cable to reach the top and come back down through a pully.

How we work it for haul back is to run winch cable on 1 drum and 6 mm poly rope on the other , so we can load the second drum with 150/200m of poly rope

[slack ma girdle]

Good size of tree for a first thin.  Is it just the racks you're taking out this time around?  Pole extraction with winch?  Did a bit of thinning recently - stacking nearly killed me and it's only 2m! [emoji33]

We are clearing out the racks this time, and pulling out the trees in whole lengths with the Mighty Nuffield/ fransgard combo. There is two of us converting and we are rolling the larger logs out of the way. With the Nuffield and Zetor i dont need alot of room, which is good as there isn't much.

[slack ma girdle]

How we work it for haul back is to run winch cable on 1 drum and 6 mm poly rope on the other , so we can load the second drum with 150/200m of poly rope

I have thought about poly rope, how are you finding durability? Does the small diameter rope cause problems going through the pullies

[andy cobb]

3 hours ago, slack ma girdle said:

13 hours ago, andy cobb said:

How we work it for haul back is to run winch cable on 1 drum and 6 mm poly rope on the other , so we can load the second drum with 150/200m of poly rope

I have thought about poly rope, how are you finding durability? Does the small diameter rope cause problems going through the pullies

We fitted some pieces of wood around the fair lead rollers so the rope can't run down the side of them. We were using a simple 8mm snatch block at the far end but found that after we'd knotted the poly rope when it broke it obviously wouldn't run, so we swapped for a 3/4 snatch block and seems to work ok.

Seems to last ok but we haven't been winching over stony ground.

think we've done about 100 ton on same length of rope (with a few knots in) so it's probably earn't it's worth

[openspaceman]

1 hour ago, andy cobb said:

We were using a simple 8mm snatch block at the far end but found that after we'd knotted the poly rope when it broke it obviously wouldn't run,

It's worth learning to splice for this sort of thing.

[andy cobb]

3 hours ago, openspaceman said:

It's worth learning to splice for this sort of thing.

It's something I've been wanting to learn for a while, for wire winch ropes more than anything. Do you happen to know of any good books showing simple splices?

[openspaceman]

23 hours ago, andy cobb said:

It's something I've been wanting to learn for a while, for wire winch ropes more than anything. Do you happen to know of any good books showing simple splices?

None that I have.

 

You first mentioned knots in polypropylene rope jamming pulleys and a simple short splice of a total of 6 tucks will do this, essentially making a short length of 6 braid. I have never faffed about with long splices as they take up a lot of rope and time.

 

I used to join wire rope but again to do that properly in the field is beyond me. So I developed a quick system for joining ropes by making an eye splice at the end of each wire rope, which is simple, and then joined the two with a quoit made just as simply by laying up a single strand 6 times and tucking the ends into the middle. One thing I did to facilitate this was to seal the ends of the strands with oxy acetylene before I started.

 

A video of the quick eye splice:

 

 

For forestry use you can't leave the end as he has done, instead separate the tail into strands and twist it around it's adjacent  strand in the live line at least three times, this is like taking each strand and making a loop like a timber hitch in each strand. You should finish by taking each strand to a different number of tucks and then removing the core to the full length of the splice and  tucking each strand in to form the core, one after another. I never bothered

This is plainly more than twice as bulky as the wire rope but it did pass through the high lead pulleys and Igland winch fairleads

Edited June 10, 2018 by openspaceman

[slack ma girdle]

Part two, enjoy.

 

[MattyF]

Nice , where can you get a self releasing block from??