Had a fun weekend, bought 200 feet up rope and have been steadily trying to figure out how to build a rope ladder to climb the bigass tree in my hard.
Currently looking not half bad - a butterfly/bend combo seems pretty stable for the rungs, I've got a base noose for the bit securing it to the tree, unfortunately I'm building the ladder as I climb it so its slow going. It's my third attempt, and I've certainly learned alot - but I think I might actually want to take the thing apart at this point and try again with a different strategy. Here's a run down of my day yesterday:
Task 1:
Tie thick piece of wood to rope, hurl through fork in tree so I have the rope looped around. Time required to complete: 1 hour. Apparently I have terrible aim, and it was a tall tree.
Task 2:
Realize that even though I managed to get it through the fork, it did not manage to come back down and and is still hanging 20 feet above my head. Begin doing wave jerks from different angles, managing to lower it an inch at a time, until it was low enough I could hook it with a branch from the ground and pull it down the rest of the way.
Task 3:
Realize I have a LOT of rope here! Tie rope to itself and pull to add a second loop, tie to cinderblocks to make it look like what I would imagine to be rigging, with four lines coming down. Be pleased with myself. Wonder if I can somehow turn this into something climbable. Decide that no, no I can't. Disassemble.
Task 4:
Work on a bunch of different knots trying to find a good midline rope bindings. Realize that I can build a ladder, work on that for a while, then realize that it would require me to start from the top and secure it to an anchor somehow, and that I have no idea how to do that. Disassemble. Switch to butterfly knots because they are prettier anyway.
Task 5:
Okay, so what else can I do? I decide to create a nice noose by tieing a loop at one end of the rope and then passing the other end through it and tightening around the tree branch. I go with a butterfly for the noose so that it has a long, strong tail I can pull to undo it later. Don't want the rope to get stuck up there. I now have a single anchored rope hanging from the tree branch, yay! Realize that I need to undo it in order to actually work with the rope, be very very glad I thought ahead.
Task 6:
Make a whole bunch of butterfly knots with big enough loops to use as footholds, all along the length of the rope. Try three times to do the previous tighten loop, but getting these knots pulled over the tree proves difficult. Finally get it done, after a couple hours.
Task 7:
Realize I have enough loose rope left over that I can start from the bottom and tie bends with the tail to actually make a ladder that can be built one rung at a time as I climb the rope. Awesome! Realize halfway that despite having a bunch of rope, I don't have enough for this. I have another rope of the same type and length, I can undo this and start with that one. But this is actually really hard, and I realize I've got no real way to make it hang properly.
Since I've got to disassemble a third of it, I might just as well pull apart the whole thing and see if I can't come up with an even better approach. ^_^
I had such a great day yesterday. Am looking forward to getting to play with the rope even more this week.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16278770 times)