Tree felling vids

i dont know if this one belongs here as it is not a tree felling vid, but ill put it here anywhoo. i hate doing palm trees, this was todays job. cheers, jaime.
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Never seen that done before. Is that what they call shaving the pineapple? Why do you "debark" it?
 
yeah, we call it shaping the pineapple. as far as the "bark" goes, if it were up to me i would clean off the loose bits and leave it at that. unfortunately i work for a company and the boss likes it like that. it makes it look cleaner, and it matches the freshly carved upper portion. you really have to be careful not to carve too much. jaime
 
I think just the nasty spines at the end of the fronds would be enough to hate pruning a date palm.. I got stuck by one as a kid and have stayed far away from them since. Hates off to you for pruning one. I imagine one day I might have to do one. That one looked real nice after your touch. Carving it.. dunno.. but it did have a finished look to it. :dontknow:
Palms don't do well at my elevation.... :D
 
cory said:
Its still hard to envision how it might happen; shallow notch, sloped sides, too much horizontal type pull at the initial moments of rapelling?
Click to expand...

I recently took a call from a north-eastern state health and safety officer, looking for an "expert" opinion...he found me through the USFS climbing program website. He was investigating a fatality that occurred when an arborist set his climb line in a notch he cut across the top of a spar he was taking down.

The cause appears to have been poor excecution by the climber in preparing the notch. The top was taken out with a humbolt face cut, which left the top of the spar with about 1/3 of it's diameter sloping downward. The notch was deep enough on the flat part but didn't go below the lower edge of the sloping portion.

He kicked off and out from the spar starting his descent rather than easing down. The rope rolled out of the notch, he fell 60 feet, and sadly died a day later in hospital.
 
Sad to read that. Got to give yourself some margin for error. I don't like to see guys cutting so close to their tie ins either.
 
With the notch, the part of the line that rolls, crawls or creeps out is.. the running part. Because it runs into the notch. You have to visualize it. It's more important to understand than you might realize. Our weight in the line tends to lead us to dangle directly vertically,, under the side of the notch that the standing part exits.

In B's tragic example the slope of the Humboldt and the climber having kicked off at, I'm assuming a right angle to it, exacerbated the roll out phenomena.

I've always paid very careful attention to this detail whenever using a notch. Always keeping an eye on it, and often with a safety around the trunk to boot.

After the friction savers came out the risk potential using the notch was reduced significantly because it isolates the running part of the line from the notch.

TIPs are all potentially hazardous if we fail to consider important details. Strength of the crotch or limb we choose,, and its relative angle to how our climb line will run through it is just one.

I've had a few close calls through my career regarding those very details, and once, I already mentioned, having run off the end of the line because I didn't have a stopper knot. Oh there were more!

Got to be sharp or we die!
 
sotc said:
Thats a shame. A year or two into his climbing career i'd guess?
Click to expand...

We didn't get into any details on the climber, Willie. Hard to say...you might be right, or it might be a guy who had been so long in the saddle that complacency had set it.
 
Definitely tragic, B, but thanks for the info.
 
Thanks B: Removed a bunch of Lombardy Pooplar (or shld I call them Unpopular) trees today and yesterday.

Funny: Just because of this thread, I decided to use the "cut-notch" trick for a couple of descents. It worked out sweet, but, I wld have everyone know that I made the notches super angular--downward-wise--and kinda rounded out the corners with the 200 so that the rope wld run smoother. Nice trick if you're really intentional about the notch.

B: For the life of me (and after reading your post twice) I can't picture what the deceased climber did. Humboldt!? What the deuce? Wldn't he know that it wld just slip down? Or am I missing something? Did he do some extra whittling on it after he took the chunk/top or something?:?
 
He cut a notch directly across the top of the spar perpendicular to the hinge, Jed. It was probably deep enough on the backcut part of the top of the spar, just not deep enough to go below the lower edge of the sloped part.
 
ive tried descending on a notch a few times and never felt comfortable with it. even leaving stubs to descend off im very conscious of what side im on relative to it. i have a pretty good imagination and, when it comes to unfamiliar/sketchy scenarios, sometimes i have trouble slowing it down. thats just me. if it is familiar and done consciously then who am i to argue. jaime
 
Burnham: Ohhh... Thanks a lot for explaining. I get it.

Jaime: Yeah, trying to imagine "what cld go wrong" is a must for a climber. The old Murphy's Law thing. Don't we have a couple of threads around here about old Murphy?

Anyway, I don't intend to rely too heavily on the old notch-repel thing anymore. It just SEEMS sketchy to me, even if you've done it in such a way that it technically isn't.
 
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