Getting the Rope Up Into the Tree

there are lots of good videos out there on how to get the rope up into the tree but I had indicated I would do one so this is that video basically you need a rope that you're going to do the throwing with and you need some type of heavy object fastened to the end of the rope to pull it up into the tree when you throw that object I started out years and years and years ago with a regular clothesline and a short piece of pipe threaded onto the clothesline tied and use that get it wedged in a crotch but that quickly proved inadequate if you want to do it correctly you can get purpose-made materials to do that and this is one sample of it I'll go close-up on this the first component is a throw bag and these are filled with shots so it's heavy but it's a it's crushable in the sense that if you hit a window or something you have a slight chance that it won't break it because it's not a rigid object these are usually made in a bright color so that they're easy to see and they're now a lot of manufacturers for them they typically come in weights ranging from 1 pound 16 ounces down to about 8 ounces and there are a lot of manufacturers but you're not going to find these at your typical hardware store you have to find a store that is specializing to some extent in outdoor stuff tree work in particular most of your steel dealerships do carry something like this this particular one I think it was about $12 the ranges now are from as low as $9 up to 30 or $40 and I can't really address why some would be worth that much more I like to use the 16-ounce because when I throw I'm usually trying to go for height and the extra weight does a better job of pulling the line up into the tree I mentioned you can't get these at your local hardware stores usually you can get these at Steel dealerships probably a few other places but you can also get them at arborist supply places and you go online and you've got West spur tree stuff calm you've got quite a few choices in ordering these the other thing is the line and this is made by Yale cordage and it's their classic slick line throw rope it's quite strong and it is designed to slide easily over branches it's not like a cotton rope or something that has fibers that will get caught and this particular one is a hundred and fifty foot length I just purchased some that's a 200 foot length and you see how it's not tightly wound around a spool it's kind of loose looped and it's very important with your throw lines you don't want them to develop tight bands or kinks and you want them to be stored with sort of flowing curves because when you throw them you're trying to pull that up and you want it to end up streaming out as more or less a straight line if there's kinks then you may have the line wrap around other parts of the line and now you've got this ball of throw line that's going up in the air and creating a lot of air resistance so to store them you want to take that into account you don't want to tightly wrap them around a spool so this is a throwing cube which is used to store the line in you can see it goes in and you have the fairly large bends and to store it you sort of twist it and fold it down and you get a fairly thin package that you can put on a shelf and then when you want to use it you pop it out and now you've got something that it can just feed right out of there to fasten the line onto the weight you want to use an anchor knot and the easiest way to do that is to pass it through once pass it to the ring a second time and then you want to make sure you capture the line that's leaving so you go around that and then back through the two loops that are around there and you draw it tight and now you've got a simple knot that pretty much won't move when you throw it up in the tree you probably are going to have to throw it several times maybe eight or ten to actually hit a specific spot you want high up in a tree each time you throw it it may go through branches you don't want comes back to ground and you don't want usually to try and pull it back up through there because coming back this stands a chance of getting caught on something you don't want so you should pretty much always go over to your weight pick it up this is after the bad throw just pull on that to undo it stick it in your pocket and then go back to your throat cube and pull the whole line back out of the tree being a small line and fairly slick the whole thing should be able to come back pretty easily then you just take it and fasten it on again the tube passes through the ring make sure you capture the line that's leaving and then back through the the two loops and you've got your anchor knot now the throw if you're talking about something very close to the ground you can just treat it like a casual toss so in this instance I want to get it up in that fairly close crotch I can just take it make sure I've got enough line throw it up there if you're trying to throw for something higher you're going to need to use some type of a pendulum type throw where for instance you swing like this and and let it go at the right point the advantage of having that is that you now have a fairly good limit laterally because you're swinging along the line you want to throw the problem is where you leave the line is going to be depending on how well you can time the exact instant you let go if you let go a little too late then it could land over there I've had that happen if you let it go too early you don't get it up to where you want to go so for a lot of people this is a good place to go for the intermediate heights for the high heights you're trying to throw 16 ounces up pretty high so you want a lot of power to it what you can do then is use both hands and what you do is you feed the line itself back through the ring so you have a loop that you can hold with one finger and then with the other hand you loop the line around your forefinger and hold it that way so you're pinching it then you can swing those together and use both of them to get some power to throw it and it's kind of the Wilt Chamberlain shop where you come through your legs to throw it so I'll show one of those and all its gracefulness when you're throwing for height the line is going to be going out pretty fast and that's going to create a little bit of air resistance you're also going to have the mass of the line itself and between that inertia and that air friction you're going to have a force coming back away from where you're trying to throw if that force is off to the side it's going to pull your throw off to that side or to that side if you've got your line over here so ideally you want your line directly in line with where you're trying to throw so for the toss now I wrap one end around my finger pinch it with my thumb the other is just hanging on my index finger so to actually do the throw I start swinging looking to where I'm going making sure that my swing is in line with all I want to go and then and since I wasn't aiming at anything in particular I've succeeded in hitting what as aiming it so let's imagine that our throw was perfect when right where we wanted to it's now up through the tree and the ideal crotch now we can come take off the climbing way or the skidding take off the throwing way stick it in our pocket and take the line we're going to use to either pull down the tree or as a climbing line now to tie the two together we don't want something that's going to be bulky and perhaps get caught on a crotch when we try to pull it back up through we're basically wanting to minimize the area that has to go back up over the limb so the best way to do this usually is to tie a hitch down here and we'll do a clove hitch with two opposing loops run that through and go oh maybe a foot back on the line and then coming up the line we'll put in another hitch and then right out near the tip to keep it pretty much in line with the throwing line as it pulls it back through we want to do another clove hitch and we want that one to be pretty whoops we want that one to be pretty close to the end of the line so here's our three hitches got a clove hitch about a foot from the end a half hitch and then at the end here we've got a clove ik now we're ready to pull that back up through the system and again we want this one to be as close to the end as possible without coming off so that it's really pulling that through in line with the other line if you're only planning on pulling over a few trees and that's the extent of what you need a throwing line for you can cap your investment at a throwing line and a throwing weight at around ten and thirteen dollars so $23 investment so that's a fairly minor a throwing cube that starts getting you up an additional twenty six dollars if you're going to use the throwing line repeatedly over the years I'd say it's a good way to store your throwing line so at $26 it makes sense to get a throwing cue if you're going to be doing a lot of tree work and this kind of limits it to the professionals but you may have a few landowners who want to do this over and over again then you end up getting tired of having to do all these throws I spent over fifteen minutes trying to get a rope where I want to into the tree and the throwing is just difficult to get that precise so one of the tools that's come on the market fairly recently is the Big Shot slingshot and it's a couple of poles fit together and it has a rubber stopper on the end so you can put it down on the ground and you put your throwing line or you're throwing weight in the little pouch pull it down and let it go so this can let you get your throws perhaps a hundred feet in the air so if you've got some really big trees you may want to get that of course the height you achieve is going to be directly related to how far back you pull it before you let it go so I'm going to take it over there and put it up in the top hopefully of a big bass would purely for demonstration when you're setting up to make your throw or to use the big shot to put the weight up into the tree you need to do a little bit of searching to try and find the best best path to use you want one where there's not a lot of interference from other branches and you have a pretty clear shot at the target crotch that you're aiming for so spend a little bit of time trying to figure out how to get the best path and be mindful also if you're near a house about what happens if your shot misses and goes towards the house so you have to pay attention to where the weight may be coming down so I picked a point that's just outside of the maple tree here and I have my crotch the password the dynamic floor and clear view I come down now obvious two hands make sure my line beautiful right where they me you gotta love these things that's probably about 60 feet up there so not a full full of football is pretty stout

Channel: Terry Hale

Views: 76,669

Rating: 4.7994428 out of 5

Keywords: tree felling, Weakened woodsman, throwline, arborist, climbing, chainsaw, rope, trees, pulling down trees

Id: Ay6aKThY_cM

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2016