Sean, would you mind going into a little more detail about the right way to handle the base tie, or not base tying when working SRT in the tree when you get time. For those of us less experienced with rope work. Thanks.
Pat
Pat, in a nutshell, I use a piece of life support rope, like a piece cut off of a climb line from it getting spiked 10' from the end. Any life support rope will do. A piece of remnant rope from an arbo supply is usually cheap, and can be a different color/ pattern than your climbing system.
I use a piece of rope and a biner for my base-tie. This can be done at waist/ chest level, or use something to stand on. I can use my hand truck (especially with the mods) to lean it against the tree and tie it at about 8'-10', or use a ladder or stand on your truck or whatever.
This high base tie helps people that are concerned about their groundie cutting the climbing system rope. My alternative, don't hire that f-ing groundie.
I use a munter-mule knot
https://midwestmountainguides.com/Tie_Munter_Mule_Knot.html, with an overhand tie-off (sometimes clipping an extra biner to the overhand tie-off and the down-strand. I use one of many life-support biners that I already have. You can spend like $150 instead on a fancy spliced, complicated, over-engineered (IMO) system. Mine is simple, cheap, functional, and almost free. If it were to get left/ lost, I'm out almost nothing, and will have a new system put together in about 2 minutes of being in my tool box. Of course you can tie the base-tie with another climbing line in case your want to climb a monster, so long as the circumference is not 150+', right?
I try to keep the base-tie a bit spun around the tree in order to keep the down-strand up against the tree, preventing most brush from having a chance to tangle in it (this hasn't really been a problem).
If you are tied at 3' of the ground, and are bombing out 5' chunks, the log can very possibly bounce back into your base tie-system. This is where a high-tie is useful. If you're tied up at 9', a 5' log isn't gonna hit the system. By the way, I choke the tree with a running bowline, this allows the system to be easily elevated, if needed.
Generally, I don't worry about needing a ground-rescue by the time I'm chunking a spar. IMO, this is much more stable and safer than when I have the top-handle and am cutting brush with drop-cuts, sometimes with one hand on the saw (chain saw or hand saw). Getting smashed by a rigged piece seems more likely than problems on a spar. I will frequently change to a top-tie, and carry my rope bag. This means that the ground crew doesn't have to keep getting my tail our of the way.
Furthermore, a base/ basal-tie puts more rope in the system than a crown tie for greater energy absorbtion in the rope, and if redirected, like in a broad-leaf tree, it can use the bending of the tree to absorb energy if a fall occurs, either from slack in the system, or a failed TIP branch (I've been 80' to a PSP primary suspension point, where the rope redirected to the ground, with a pencil size sprout supporting my jump-testing, which was 1' over a bomb-proof main crotch.)
In the treebuzz articles section there is an Engineering a Tree Removal article which goes into some of this concept of redirecting through the crown redirects the vector force down (compression) the stem, rather than laterally loading it.
Please ask more questions.
I have a new phone with the Tapatalk app which makes pictures easier to download. I'll try to get some new pics on my new phone and upload, as needed.
