Portable Winches?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Grendel
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies Replies 131
  • Views Views 17K
So here she is working. Lifting things up Gin Poles and yarding.
This vid shows us extracting logs and tops out of the brush line with a gin pole above the landing. Winch yards, then lifts and then I lower the load off the winch capstan as the ground man swings it into the LZ.
The last couple are transfers from a Gin Pole set up further back on the hill.
Hope you can make this out.
So far it is a huge labor saver on this job and one coming up on Monday and Tuesday. It will have earned it's cost in less than three days of work if I am right.
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sbwbujUr0is" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
Stephen, good job supplementing your equipment there. Those winches are kind of from a different era when things moved at a slower pace, but they do get it done.
 
Still fits a niche in the kit. I think it will come into to play a lot over the next couple years. Main thing is it can get the material to where the equipment can then take over. Maybe slow, but faster than other options. Moves more than a guy can anyway.. even more than two.
Now I need a large clean up bag to hoist up and drift to where the dingo can take it to the trailer. :/:
 
A great brush bag is a tarp that pulls up into a bag, has five or six inch wide very strong heavily stitched bands running crisscross from the corners on the underside and extending well past those corners by three or four feet ending with a loop. Pile the brush onto the flat sheet and pull the corners up by the loops with your device, and you can carry the contained brush along very nicely. Very easy to unload as well, just detach two corners and pull up on the remaining two and it dumps itself. Amazingly strong for a heavy woven natural fabric, and also soft and pliable. Easily picks up a bunch of heavy short logs or brush. Rolls or folds up cleanly and takes up little room. i see gardeners using them and have borrowed on occasion. Ideal, and not very expensive either. I wonder if available elsewhere?
 
I've had mine 7 years now. Worked it really hard and consistent at times. And yet at other times it can sit on the shelf for months, but never fail to start. It's probably the equivalent of go-anywhere 5 guys pulling on a rope, but without the back chat.
 
woodworkingboy said:
A great brush bag is a tarp that pulls up into a bag, has five or six inch wide very strong heavily stitched bands running crisscross from the corners on the underside and extending well past those corners by three or four feet ending with a loop. Pile the brush onto the flat sheet and pull the corners up by the loops with your device, and you can carry the contained brush along very nicely. Very easy to unload as well, just detach two corners and pull up on the remaining two and it dumps itself. Amazingly strong for a heavy woven natural fabric, and also soft and pliable. Easily picks up a bunch of heavy short logs or brush. Rolls or folds up cleanly and takes up little room. i see gardeners using them and have borrowed on occasion. Ideal, and not very expensive either. I wonder if available elsewhere?
Click to expand...

We are going to try just that Jay. I have a spool of some 3/8ths 3 strand nylon to put through the eyelets on some tarps. Fill them up, draw the strings, snatch it and lift. If it works as well as I think it will on that steep hill job, we will buy canvas or something tough or one of those dumpster bags

Reg, today we tried to drag some stuff up hill but just too many grabby things to deal with. I set a gin pole up, went smooth with the high block. Lift and drift up. So high rigging is key of course. Everyone wants the mini to do it all. I watched some wasted time trying to drag things with it. I should have set the while business up from the start and had them use it. Oh well... Their resistance is futile.
 
Tou got to fail to learn sometimes. I'm loving this stuff. I get to let everyone else learn the hard way. Honestly I appreciate everything. I hope to figure something out that's you guys find useful one day
 
  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
  • #90
You and Jed are our resident assassins Rich. Pictures of a nice hinge up everybodys game. 8)

I've had to bevel the ends of the logs like the old timers used to Stephan. Also had a guy with a cant hook follow along and roll it around obstructions. Sometimes it just turns into a mess though.

High rigging all the way.
 
RegC said:
It's probably the equivalent of go-anywhere 5 guys pulling on a rope, but without the back chat.
Click to expand...
Probably could pull alot more then 5 guys Reg. Took a rigging course once and we had a digital weigh scale on a rope. The most us students could pull was our own body weight, I jerked the rope and got 280 lbs.
 
No doubt, but after 7 years mines probably lost a little steam. I usually estimate around or under what you were able to generate, for manpower.....say 230-250 lbs pull per man, depending on their size line angle of course. If you've pulled a lot of trees with just manpower, it's pretty easy thereafter to estimate the amount of force required to pull a tree with a vehicle, and stay within the working limits of your rigging. Always puzzles me to hear some people's damming judgement of using vehicles or machines to pull trees, because of the supposed unknown forces involved. When actually, with some experience and common sense, it's not hard to figure out how much resistance to expect once the falling cuts have been made. Yeah, could never get why some arborist types get in such a panic about the whole thing.

Anyway, mine came with 2 spools, small and bigger. I generally stick with the bigger one which pulls less, but faster. Getting an elevated rigging point through re-directs is always worth the extra set-up time. Huge advantage gained.
 
Rookies commonly combine thick hinges with hard pulling, rather than enough hinge and moderate/ light pulling, especially with good line angle.

Rookies are also likely to attach the rope to the vehicle with a knot, rather than a bollard, when needed.


I'd heard that saying of 'pulling your own weight' as being literal, as Willard alludes to.
 
  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
  • #94
Yeah, they hit us with that in Fire School, that a man can pull the general equivalent of his body weight.

You'd hope a guy would only tie a rope to a pulling vehicle with a knot once or twice before he got the clue :/:

My portable winch has made me wish I had a 600'er of 1/2" stable braid more than once. Still haven't pulled the trigger on one though. . .

Unrelated: But I've been wondering, If a guy were to hang a length of cable or rope from a fixed point, with an unlimited drop beneath, in excess of the breaking strength from that point, would the rope break under it's own weight? Like if I were able to hang 20,000' of half inch line off a bottomless pit, would that line break under it's own weight, or would the load be so distributed that it would hold? And if so, how is that possible when the full weight would be bearing on the connection point?

Sorry, but I've been puzzling over this one for awhile.

Cheers
 
Yeah... thinking 600 foot spool here soon....
Stable braid is about 8.6 lbs per 100 foot.
Let's say 10 to make it easy.
20000 feet divided by 100 = 200, 100 foot hanks
200 x 10 = 2000 lbs
1/2 is rated for 10000.
 
  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
  • #96
Ok so that was a bad example, but what if it was 100,000'? I'll have to do some more research, there must be some engineering principle that covers this. . .
 
Grendel said:
Ok so that was a bad example, but what if it was 100,000'? I'll have to do some more research, there must be some engineering principle that covers this. . .
Click to expand...
Look at that from the anchor point's point of view : generally speaking, the anchor point (and the small bit of rope just under it) take all the load, no matter of the rope's length between it and the working load. In fact, this real load is the sum of the working load and the rigging weight ( add angles, leverage and so on if needed...). Usually, the rigging weight is nearly nothing compared to the working load but it is here in the math. If you put so much rope in the system, the real load is made only by the rigging weight and you can add nothing as a working load.
There is no reason that the anchor point can sustain more load simply because you add more rope under it (assuming it's free hanging). The weight could be very well distributed, only the total interests the anchor point. So, the last free bit of rope sees no load at all, the first bit of rope sees all the load. Perhaps from the infinity of the other small bits of rope under it, but it doesn't care, it's still too much load for it...
... snap !
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Altissimus
Clutch adjustment on the Farmy style Winch
Replies
0
Views
319
Altissimus
Altissimus
Ed L
Winch issues
Replies
2
Views
602
flushcut
flushcut
Altissimus
Habbeger Wire Rope Winches
Replies
10
Views
2K
Altissimus
Altissimus
F
Different winch
Replies
20
Views
3K
Tree09
Tree09
Tree09
Winch bed and trailer build
2 3
Replies
70
Views
8K
Tree09
Tree09
Back
Top