WorcsWuss

I have the much maligned 'death spurs'... always use a line! [And it was a dead Euc with all the bark plating off...]

Because it wasn't on the clock, I take my time and enjoy it, it was for a family friend, I have an inexperienced groundie who also does it for enjoyment, it was a bit of a ball ache to get the line up [leaning tight into a conny which we couldn't damage] and we weren't chipping, the brash was cut & made into a neat little bonfire, we corded the light timber, logged & split the big stuff and stacked it all down the garden, and we stopped for a sandwich.... If this had been for a 'civvy' I would have charged twice that for the same job... And Rich, sort of right, not so much starting out as not doing it day in day out. I've been working on trees since I was 16, I did my tickets in 1998 I think, I haven't worked full time 'in the countryside' since 2002....

Keep your eyes peeled for the 'extension ladder' for use in tree work.... [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJzz8aU3Ztw]Part 1 of 2 - Land Rover - All in a Day's Work - YouTube[/ame]

Ram 40 was predecessor to the TR200 / 250's.... excellent bit of kit, pivot steer, central telescopic boom, very simple.... The one you're thinking of is the Teleshift, either Collins, RWC or Matbro version...

Don't get me wrong guys, I'm not an advocate for doing things on the cheap, you need to put my £100 into perspective! 75% of the people on here would have done what I did in an hour, so £100 for the job was probably fair.... and it was my mother's best friend I was working for!!! I reckon a sensible day rate for a climber with his own kit on nice straight forward stuff should be around £150 in this day and age, chippers, tippers, groundies and so on would be on top of that.

You reckon? I take my time, one of you boys would have had it done in an hour! I though it was about right though... All the kit was mine, paid the groundie £25, took £50 for myself, only consumables were 1 sharpening each of 2 chains & a couple of tanks of fuel, left £25 towards insurance, fuel etc... And that was mates rates!

How do you set that up Pete..? My oldest climbs on my set up [HC & VT] but that's only around smaller stuff, up to sort of 20 feet max. Beyond that I'd like to be able to get her down from the ground. Other than using a second line attached to the base of the tree through a FS with a pulley on the end for her line which I can then lower on if need be, is there any other way?

Your price seems spot on to me... I took a dead eucalyptus out the other week for £100, me plus groundie, no chipper, timber corded & stacked on site, brash piled for burning by the client, awkward climb to get going, tight-ish LZ, took us about 3 & a half hours. Don't compete with dead men walking....

What would probably be a better fail safe would be to set them up independently auto tending, with or without the friction cord long enough so that she can reach it or not, but attach a thin dyneema sling into the crab on the tending pulley and attach that to your rig, that way if they do pull to go and release the hitch they'll only go as far as the sling will let them before it pulls their friction hitch back on and stops the descent....

Very true, and it could also well be that the injured parties were absolutely on the ball except for the split second the limb fell, they may even have been trying to leave an area they decided was unsafe under the circumstances.... Group hug....

Sorry, grandma & eggs! I guess the way you describe would work but only in that it will be auto-tending off your line rather than her own.... and only so long as the various elements are under the correct amount of tension and you're moving at the exact same pace as she is, it may end up making it more difficult for her...

God you two, get a room.....! :lol: I agree in the main as well.... bearing in mind there are already effective mechanisms in place to protect employees should they lose their job by refusing to do something unsafe... the tribunal system. So that's not really an excuse for working in a dangerous way... And a murderer is not the same as someone who failed to inspect every tree in their park every other week, or year or whatever.... Murder comes with intent, negligence generally doesn't, but courts decide whether there was. And imminent murder disguises itself better than trees on a windy day... Although as Pete pointed out, we don't know the specific ins and outs of this case... My vote still goes for looking out for number one though, because no one else will until something's happened to you...

SAS Malvern...

Here, somewhere in this vid.... [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1RSzKkBOWc]Ascending - Doubled Rope Technique - YouTube[/ame]

Absolutely right, a small prussic loop just a bit higher than the hitch on the working end of her own rope above where she's tied on, crab & micro pulley under the hitch, as she pulls the tail down it will auto advance the hitch. Piece of cake, it's how I learned...

If you're just lifting bags, what about a straight forward jib on the forks with a hook for the bag loops, similar to a fertiliser bag handler... light steel RSJ welded onto a length of box section & slide it onto a fork....? cheap, cheerful & effective...

You're right of course, and we should definitely be responsible, and punished, should our actions adversely affect others. As you rightly point out though, punishing offenders does not bring the victim back, and in many cases, such as murder or assault, there is no way of the victim preventing these things from happening themselves. But in most of the cases brought by the HSE or, heaven forbid, the ambulance chasers, many of these incidents could have been avoided through the application of a little common sense or even just spacial awareness. It is encouraging people to acquire the skills necessary to appraise situations they find themselves in to maintain their own personal safety, which will prevent future occurences, not the HSE throwing their legal weight around. Even 'breaches of health & safety law' by companies who fail to provide the correct equipment to staff who then get injured must surely be viewed from the perspective that, if this was such a dangerous occurrence that the company, who failed to identify it from the isolation of their office, should be prosecuted, then what kind of IDIOT was it who actually went ahead and worked in that way and ended up seriously injured? I would NEVER do anything dangerous just because my employer hadn't told me otherwise.... I've made it into my 30's following that rule...! Prosecuting someone, anyone, because the law is set up such that it is deemed to have failed without apportioning blame to someone, does nothing to keep people out of what, to many, are obviously dangerous situations or prevent them from tripping over their own feet... basic life lessons teach this... surely it's not to much to expect such pearls of wisdom as 'look where you're going' and 'don't walk under trees on windy days' to be passed down through the generations...?

I agree with you in principal, the problem is, where to draw the line. I do however disagree that you should only make a judgement on whether a situation is safe if you're professionally trained. Contrary to the opinion many regularly form of me, I don't know everything... but that doesn't stop me applying some basic sanity checks to every situation I find myself in... But even where I have NO knowledge of a subject or situation [i'm sure there are plenty of them, I just can't think of any off the top of my head!] I make a huge point of trying to be intelligent enough to not die. In fact, I'm not a qualified arborist, but I climb and dismantle trees based much of the time on common sense.... and the burning desire to go home to my kids at the end of the day.... If I see a lorry with a potentially wobbly load approaching me when I'm driving.... I keep an eye on it, make sure I don't get boxed in by a slow car in front, keep and eye out for an escape route should I need it... the fact that the lorry driver might go to jail because I was killed after a strap breaks causing 60 tonnes of steel to flatten my car doesn't really help me. If I'm walking down some steps in a shopping centre, I look at the floor occasionally, make sure there aren't loose surfaces or things I might trip over. Because even if I do sue the council, I'll still have looked a complete knob in front of all the jailbait that hangs out around mobile phone shops.... I don't want to be on Youtube! If I'm on a building site, I make sure I'm not going to walk under someone accidentally knocking some debris off a scaffold or into the swing zone of a digger. I want to live, and the only person who REALLY gives a toss about making sure that continues to happen is me... If I have a lapse in concentration or fail to identify grave dangers to my person [even those well outside my knowledge base] and I end up dead, I'm the one who pays, so responsibility for preventing that always falls to me. This isn't making a detailed assessment on the condition of a tree, this is just looking at the wider situation and making a common sense judgement on whether or not it's a safe one to put yourself into... If you put your tree MOT into practice, every single entity on the planet would need to be certified, double checked and regularly inspected. And the word accident would be struck from the dictionary... like it has with the police... Or am I totally alone in looking out for myself? Should I just rely on someone else's risk assessment to keep me alive [or otherwise] instead, like Mr Average generally seems to do these days...?

I have 3 of them ...[deja vu...?] 1 on a wire core, 1 on a short strop & one on a 15m rope for pruning... great little bit of kit...

That's not a great example, even the most moronic member of our illustrious public should be able to spot some of the signs of there being something not quite right about that situation which may start to jingle faint alarm bells..... does no one look up anymore...?! I still maintain that we are all responsible for our own personal safety... if it's a windy day then look up at the trees... if they're moving a lot, don't walk too close to them. You really don't need a diploma in arboriculture to make that judgement. Unfortunately the example you described is exactly the perfectly well meaning logic which leads to everyone expecting someone else to be looking out for them, and then, by extension, when they walk under a falling tree or trip over a loose paving slab, it's everyone's fault but their own... If my groundie walks under me when I'm chucking stuff down, it's his fault and I give him a rollocking.... If a member of the public did the same, they'd also get short shrift.... no doubt I'd get sent down for not digging a moat, rolling out razor wire, erecting a PA system and employing dog patrols, but morally, it would still be the fault of the plank who didn't look beyond the end of his nose that he suffered whatever injuries he suffered...

I found it was only when I got to 9 that it got more expensive...!

Everything's crap these days Andy... life was better in the olden days.... In all seriousness though I have noticed the same, can I get them to hold air? Can I heck...

I really like Aeris, and it's cheap enough to have a punt on... give it a go!

Absolutely right, and I hope the little lad is all better now. But I have to say though, I always make a point of looking up and around in winds, even in the car. It's no one else's responsibility to look out for my children or myself but my own.... It's about time the legal system reflected this and drew a line under the insistence on making someone responsible for everything which happens.... I fail to see how it can be anybody's fault someone gets injured if a branch falls off a tree in high winds, other than the person getting injured by it for not taking sensible precautions about where they were standing. Common sense, or the lack of it, by any injured party needs to become acknowledged as the primary cause of accidents again. We [as a population] expose ourselves to unecessary danger these days purely as a result of the assumption that because we're protected by a poorly judged legal system, bad things won't happen because someone is responsible. Remove that false sense of security and I'm sure accidents like this would become even less common as individuals began to exercise their own sense of self preservation a bit further... Personally, the knowledge that someone will get sued if my child becomes permanently disabled by accident is not sufficient to cause me to expose them to those risks.... The general population would do well to work on that basis a bit more frequently...

Crikey, there really is something for everyone out there!!! :lol: