Using Ultrasling anchors for *negative* rigging?

[ArborOdyssey]

So I was about to make an Ultrasling for my Safebloc, when it hit me.....due to the "slop"/slack that's inherent to an Ultra (IE, you can't choke it off/cinch it tight, your hardware resides wherever the sling's pocket fits it), I started picturing setting-up a typical spar-dismantle and pictured trying to invert my Safebloc as it comes out of the pocket of an ultrasling and couldn't help thinking "This thing is only gonna hold the sling's position when the hardware is pulling-down into the sling, if I invert the Safebloc while removing slack from my system before making a back-cut then, during the tip & fall of the log - bringing the Safebloc back to its normal orientation - there's a period where there's ZERO tension on the body of the ultrasling, so what's to stop it from moving around during that moment?"

 

Would love to hear people's thoughts, especially if you actually use a Safebloc-on-Ultrasling and have negative-rigged with it, how reliable is the sling's position on the spar during that period of the Safebloc going from inverted to normal?

[Paddy1000111]

 I've not used a safebloc but I have an ultrasling with a ring, never had it slip or slide on a pole. The loading is pretty instantaneous plus the loading to grip ratio are directly correlated. I.e with 5kg load it has a small amount of grip, with 100kg it has a tonne of grip. The more load, the more grip. There's never really a time during that fall where you have no grip and a high load. Whack the ultra around a tree, synch it up and then let all the weight off and try to pull it down, it won't shift.

 

All things being equal worst case scenario it slides a couple of feet on a super slippery tree like a beech and maybe causes you to gaff out but I've yet to see that happen? Maybe someone else has had that experience.

[ArborOdyssey]

ANYONE ever see (or hear-of!!) an Ultrasling anchor sliding/moving/etc on a stem?  Or other "unpredictability" issues?(Eg., while I've never had a need for/owned one, I've heard of multiple issues w/ Loopies....seems they are user-fault, but also that seasoned/veteran users are sometimes falling for it, if I'm understanding correctly - enough to make me uninterested)

 

1 hour ago, Paddy1000111 said:

 I've not used a safebloc but I have an ultrasling with a ring, never had it slip or slide on a pole. The loading is pretty instantaneous plus the loading to grip ratio are directly correlated. I.e with 5kg load it has a small amount of grip, with 100kg it has a tonne of grip. The more load, the more grip. There's never really a time during that fall where you have no grip and a high load. Whack the ultra around a tree, synch it up and then let all the weight off and try to pull it down, it won't shift.

 

All things being equal worst case scenario it slides a couple of feet on a super slippery tree like a beech and maybe causes you to gaff out but I've yet to see that happen? Maybe someone else has had that experience.

 

Well, you sold me on it!!  It's like 16.5' long dead-eye right now, I like that but it was previously a Whoopie which means once I pulled the tail to make it Deadeye, the actual bury for the Safebloc has an incredibly abrupt ending (and isn't buried nearly as deep as you'd want for a single eye -- surprised the bury-length changes/shrinks for making whoopies, somehow...at least Samson's change, as that's all I use for almost all my splicing) so was gonna resplice it and it got me thinking "Why not make another Ultrasling with it? " (I just made a double-head T-Rex Ultra with Lrg rings that I had on-hand w/o any use, hopefully will finally use them a bit they do bite 5/8 bullrope really well!!) 
 

SO....comparing what I've got // what I'll have:

A)  Safebloc on 16' deadeye, allows maybe 2.5' thick trunk max if tied w/ timber hitch? Weak point in the sling is where buried tail terminates, and strength rating would be less-than the cordage's strength (3/4" TEC so 24k IIRC)

B) SB on ~7' ultrasling, still allows a ~2.5' thick trunk (well, minus the length of its tail)  As a sling, it is stronger than regular 3/4" TEC ABS (since it's essentially a double/basket configuration, with losses to the brummelling)  Tightness/"slop" in the rigging shouldn't be much issue if the pockets are made tightly enough (any reco's for pocket configurations would be appreciated, wish this cord was like 8' longer as I'd like to make more, smaller pockets but don't want it coming in with shorter usability than I'd have gotten using it deadeye + timber hitching!)

 

Think it's the smart move now, will probably splice it this afternoon actually, if anyone's got tips on how to "cheat the ending" to reduce that giant tail I'd be appreciative (for instance in Poplar Mechanic's youtube instructional he shows a modified 'butt' for Ultra's, since the end-part of the butt is really just an "aesthetic backsplicing", honestly I've been thinking "Just do 5 brummels to finish the last pocket, then some modified 'end for end' with the two tails" so there's as small a 'butt' to the sling as possible!

 

[PS I will measure the circumference I can get w/ the same cordage, from deadeye to ultra configuration!  Just gotta lay this sucker in a perfect circle to 'timber hitch' to my floor ]

[ArborOdyssey]

err OK so it's more like a 21" diameter capacity, now that I've laid it out as a cow hitch w/ better half (leaving the shortest tail coming out, not something I'd be too happy w/ IRL)

 

The sling is 16 maybe 16.5' deadeye now, am guessing (hoping!) I'll get a 7' out of it and, based on that last pocket, can see how the max-diameters match up (with the loss to the 'butt' of the ultra, I bet it'll get <21"   and the more&closer I brummel it, as I'd like to so I have more precision, the shorter it'll be....if it's <6' I basically have to call it and probably resplice as regular deadeye, only w/ a regular, not a whoopie's, bury on the Bloc's eye this time ;D )

[Paddy1000111]

I used T-rex for my ultra-sling as Tuefelberger has great quality splicing instructions and armed with a tape measure, some whipping thread and and a little bit of OCD about placement there really isn't anything you can get wrong if you follow the manual. 

 

I like the ultra/loopie/ploopie etc slings as there's minimal area for messing up with a no-knot system. I'm sure someone will tell me that you shouldn't be rigging if you aren't confident in your knots but I come from the aircraft industry and if you can remove the chance for a human factor error then you remove it. There's a reason planes crash and 80% of the time it's human error. 

 

What size T-rex are you working with? 

[ArborOdyssey]

On 20/11/2020 at 16:09, Paddy1000111 said:

I used T-rex for my ultra-sling as Tuefelberger has great quality splicing instructions and armed with a tape measure, some whipping thread and and a little bit of OCD about placement there really isn't anything you can get wrong if you follow the manual. 

 

I like the ultra/loopie/ploopie etc slings as there's minimal area for messing up with a no-knot system. I'm sure someone will tell me that you shouldn't be rigging if you aren't confident in your knots but I come from the aircraft industry and if you can remove the chance for a human factor error then you remove it. There's a reason planes crash and 80% of the time it's human error. 

 

What size T-rex are you working with? 

LOVED the comparison to aviation and general notion of "we remove human error wherever possible"!!! 

 

 

 

Couldn't find the teufelberger Ultra instructions anywhere when I went and made an Ultra-Bloc sling from the ~17.5' of 3/4TEC I had it slung in already (as dead-eye, but this was because I'd pulled the tail through from a Whoopie config, and the instructions for whoopies have your actual hardware's-eye's bury being a really shortened, and abruptly-ending, bury....this was driving me nuts so I was going to re-do the deadeye splice anyway which is why I'd thought "Hey make an Ultra, the one you made last week is awesome but only medium-duty!"

But....I woulda needed at least 25' probably closer to 30' to do it the way I'd want IE:

- 8' long (with ~2/3' long "butt"/useless-tail included so 7.33' "use-able" length; Most of that 2/3' butt would be the bury, only last few inches for backsplice as I just nail it in place w/ lock-stitching to shorten that part of the 'butt' ? )

- crazy-tight pockets, I mean like just-big-enough for my Bloc to fit through....as I got to my 3rd pocket I realized just how much rope I was losing to the triple-brummel "soft shackle" pocketing I was making.

 

It did get comparable "max diameter of practical usage" as same cordage as-deadeye did (both require 2 legs of rope around the stem, the ultra's losses are to buries & brummels and the deadeye's are to the knotting/hitching used to affix it), but that's going through those long pockets which means I'd have too much slop/slack in my system in certain instances (the Bloc's inversion already requires a 1' allowance in-between the height of the sling's position and the half-hitch on the piece you're cutting, my pockets would've added nearly 1' extra if the stem were just the right(wrong!) width)

The pockets had to be too large though, needed more pockets and more length, but after seeing it....wasteful & a bit embarrassing but changed my mind, don't want to give-up the tightness that my deadeyes allow so instead of ordering longer/appropriate cordage to make a proper Ultra I did the original plan and simply re-did the deadeye only with a good&proper bury this time, not a "whoopie bury"!  Never had to remove my teufelberger-inspired "pointed tail" ending on the rope so that is nice

[best/smoothest bury I've ever done on TEC, wish I altered/smoothed the first tapering in addition to the final tail-taper but this did the job, looks far better than it did when it was like 18" of bury w/ an abrupt ending, from the Whoopie build

On 20/11/2020 at 16:09, Paddy1000111 said:

 

What size T-rex are you working with? 

 

That was really a once-off, first&only time I've gotten (or seen!) trex, got 17 or 18' of 5/8" and used a spare pair of Lrg rings to make a double-header Ultrasling, have yet to use it (my default bullrope is 5/8 with a splice and that doesn't pass-through the "Large" x-rings...though I will say those 'large' rings do give the 5/8 great friction if you do use them w/ an unspliced 5/8 bullrope!)

 

 

 

[edit-to-add: The pic with the measuring tape: I'd laid the deadeye on the floor and made a cow hitch to see my max-diameter of real use-ability and it was within a couple inches, low 20"'s]

 

Edited November 22, 2020 by ArborOdyssey
pic w/ ruler didn't have accompanying pic of the deadeye on ruler, showing comparable max-diameter usability

[ArborOdyssey]

Re Treestuff saying "T-Rex is unsuitable for Safebloc eyes, it elongates too much and could lead to failure"....  Aside from the mountain of Q's I have on their statement there, I should note I was able to remove my Safebloc from the eye I'd made, sadly   I had to fight it out/spend 30sec massaging the eye to do it but I was able to.... here's the throat of the first deadeye's eye-splice:

 

I was also (far, FAR more easily) able to remove the two Lrg, and one XL, x-rings from my pre-made 3-ringed sling (they were scary loose, and no the sling was not beaten on!)  SOOoooo, this time I made damn sure to spend the time on ensuring the rope was "pre-tensioned" a little bit when setting the brummelling, w/o doing that there will always be slack (also I figured since things settle, and rope's stretch a lil over time, that it was better to just go as tight, basically, as the strength of my hands allowed!)

super tight, allows some 'rotational' sliding of Bloc in eye but not much,  probably as tight as you can/should put a 12S around a ring:

sooo tight closer-up:

 

edited-to-add: I've gotta say it was only pretty recent I learned this, "daisy chaining" a long rope by just repeatedly slipknotting it (and I make a bite at the end, pass tail through & pull, to 'lock' the top until I'm ready to pull&un-do the whole chain), makes dealing w/ long slings (and long fliplines!) so much simpler!!

 

Edited November 22, 2020 by ArborOdyssey

[Paddy1000111]

They look good! I can't remember where I saw the instructions from tuefelberger. I know they have one for a loopie sling and they definitely have them for the Ultra or they wouldn't sell them. God knows where I found it. The instructions from Poplar mechanic were easier to follow though. 

 

For the eye tighness I have tied off one end to a rafter and then hung a bucket off the other so theres 25kg of force puling it tight before pushing a spike through the joint to lock it and then carry on the splicing pulling everything very tight. You should also lockstitch the splice as per the teufelberger manual for trex splicing to lock it all in place (which it looks like you have anyway). I've not used a safebloc but are you meant to insure that the rope enters one side of the block and exits the other so it can't ever pull out of the sling? 

[Paddy1000111]

Here's one of the rings I spliced in, so tight it's hard to rotate and locked in by lockstitches. I have quite a short end and I whip the tail just so it looks nicer

[ArborOdyssey]

On 22/11/2020 at 12:57, Paddy1000111 said:

They look good! I can't remember where I saw the instructions from tuefelberger. I know they have one for a loopie sling and they definitely have them for the Ultra or they wouldn't sell them. God knows where I found it. The instructions from Poplar mechanic were easier to follow though. 

 

For the eye tighness I have tied off one end to a rafter and then hung a bucket off the other so theres 25kg of force puling it tight before pushing a spike through the joint to lock it and then carry on the splicing pulling everything very tight. You should also lockstitch the splice as per the teufelberger manual for trex splicing to lock it all in place (which it looks like you have anyway). I've not used a safebloc but are you meant to insure that the rope enters one side of the block and exits the other so it can't ever pull out of the sling? 

Thanks!!  Yeah Poplar's are easy to follow (makes sense, he did create that configuration in the 1st place....LOL if Buckingham can say "The Treesqueeze is patent-pending, nobody else can make these" then Poplar/Boomslang should be able to say the same for Ultra's!)

 

Re eye tightness could you elaborate on the part about pushing a spike through the joint?  Do you mean the first brummel-passing?  I was following you as you hung one end of the sling w/ a bucket so it was under-load (awesome idea btw) but wanna be sure I get you, I do see that doing that could've made it easier to set my 1st brummel, but setting it by hand wasn't particularly hard at least that's what I thought, if I had help with line tension I don't *think* I would've made that first brummel at a different point but who knows maybe it'd have been a crown tighter (I dislike setting splices with rock-hard eyes around hardware, has always seemed bad for the rope to me, the "creep" of double-braid buries drove me nuts when it'd lock-down onto the 1/2" steel rope-thimbles I use, til I learned how to leave slack to account for it!)

 

I did lock-stitch, I don't do as many passes as recommended but do at least 3 passes perpendicular to the eye (so that the locking is, for sure, going through both cords - the 90deg offset row of lockstitching is, of course, going to be less useful than the line that's going dead-center through both ropes!)  I do find locking to be pretty useless though TBH and think I do it more because "I should" than anything, my last batch of friction hitches (Ice Tail) I left one w/o locking (and did this on my prior batch of them) as I'm curious to see if I ever get one to slip, obviously I never use one of these w/o inspection but I've always been that way with my hitches anyway ;D

 

Re the Bloc....no they actually tell you "Use just 2 holes for less friction" which, naturally, would have both legs pulling that Bloc from the same side.....so let's say you've done that, *and* then you went ahead and put a redirect in the canopy at the same height as the Bloc so you could fairlead the bullrope directly into the Safebloc in a purely horizontal plane, would be interesting to see how it'd perform that way, I imagine you'd pop the Bloc before rupturing the 3/4TEC in that type of configuration but I take great comfort in the fact that I can't find a single anecdote of hardware(rings or Bloc's) escaping from slings, and when considering lateral pressures just consider that 3-ringed x-sling, if you've seen it in-use the rings 'squish' on each other, lifting the center ring & arching-outwards the two outer rings, this type of lateral pressure on the outside "Large" x-ring, that's seated in oversized 3/4TEC (oversized for the groove of a Lrg ring, IMO), and that sling is still being sold....very reassuring!!