We got back on the job yesterday to do ‘the easy part’. Hah!
The easy part was just the simple tightening of the highline so that it was taut, off the ground and well-fastened. All I had to do was pull it tight around a block and then bulldog clamp the cable in place. There is a bit of a challenge in pulling a 150′ long cable that is 3/8″ in diameter and that challenge is greater the tighter one wants the cable to be. I wanted tight and taut . . . like hundreds of pounds pull-tight.
I pulled the cable by rubber-gloved brute strength and Sal jammed a tool in the block so that it would stay there. Estimated pull strength…maybe 100 pounds. Then, with the cable slack now taken up, I attached a ring to the tail end and then attached a come-along to that ring. I tied off the come-along to an anchor point and pulled up another 4 feet. That made it pretty good. Tight-like-bow-string. Challenge #2 was that the tail line was just not close enough to the main line and so squeezing them together for bulldog clamping just did not work.
Re-jammed the tool in the block, reset everything. Repositioned the angle of the come-along so that both lines more closely paralleled. Pulled it up again. Nice and tight. And it was now parallel enough that my hand-grip was sufficient to be able to place the bull-dog clamps. Which we did. Ooooh, that line looked nice!
“But, but, but . . . “, said Sal. “I see a bit of sag in the line if I look closely.” And that is where the genius of a large turnbuckle in the system pays off, my little rigging bunny! Let’s tighten the turnbuckle”. And, so we did. That puppy was practically humming like a tuning fork after a dozen turns. And we have only used a couple of inches on the turnbuckle. After a while, the line will stretch some (maybe as much as 6″) and then we will just snug ‘er back up with some more turns in the buckle.
Who woulda thunk it? Two days. Two hours each day. Highline, genset, long electrical line . . . all almost ready to go (I have some wiring and such to do for the electrical line down at the lagoon end but that can come later).
For Valentines Day, I ordered Sal a lovely little two-ton chain-hoist. Red, of course. It is Valentine’s day, after all. It comes tomorrow. We’ll set it on the highline and attach it to the pull-line and send it down to the lagoon. Sal will attach a log and, instead of pulling on the old block-and-tackle, she will use the chain-hoist requiring less strength than pulling a curtain cord.
If we keep this up, everything will be easy to do . . . just before we expire.
Our Off the Grid Home 
Well done!
Impressive.
What sort of weight are you hauling up?
Wet logs. etc?
LikeLike
Well, Sal weighs 125#. She has been using a 4:1 block and taykle to lift the logs. So I cut them to my rough estimate of 500 pounds. Sometimes Sal just hangs in the air trying to lift them. Most of the time she can just do it. So, I am guesstimating each cut to be just under 500 pounds. But, with the chain hoist, I can cut ’em a bit a bit heavier. In fact, I cut ’em for 500 pounds (wild guess) and in increments of 7 feet (i.e 7/14). Why? Because I get 6 cuts of 14″ lengths from that. And most people think wood is just wood….hah!
LikeLike
I think you have a firewood fetish…. 🙂
LikeLike
Well, firewood DOES get me hot…..
LikeLike
Actually, firewood gets you hot at least 3 times 🙂 . Impressive work, both of you! And some pretty nice engineering thinking too…that and years of practice OTG I suppose. Weather seems OK also for this time of the year? So now a well deserved rest, or log hauling for the coming days?
LikeLike
Oh, yeah….a week of hauling and cutting is now in store. But we are looking forward to it….kinda.
LikeLike
I’m impressed too. Just getting up and down that embankment (cliff?) looks mighty difficult to me.
LikeLike
Ol’ Sal goes up it like a mountain goat. I tend to go a bit slower but up and own is not all that hard unless you are also carrying heavy stuff. If laden, I stop half way for a bit to catch my breath. The hill does not intimidate me at all but the greasy, slimy, irregular beach boulders are starting to. I’ll just be careful.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Congratulations you two. What a huge job bring those logs up from the beach for further processing. Respect.
LikeLike
Thank you for that but, to be accurate, the logs are still there and the recent two blogs were all about getting ‘in the position to do that’. But we are now ‘in position’ and the weather is good…so we will begin the heavy lifting tomorrow. The REALLY best part? We have the wood collected way, way early (thanks to the landslide).
LikeLike
Cold and sunny all next week!
No slackin’!
Get Crack a lackin’ !
Yes I am an a-hole…….
🙂
LikeLike