On the roof were two very heavy cast iron vent pipes and one big vent pipe constructed with some cast and some asbestos.
With three of us there I climbed up on the roof and cut the pipes away. Cutting them into sections that I could lift and pass behind me.
It was when we got them all on the scaffold and realised there was a fair bit of it. Carrying it down the ladder would take ages so we decided to use the winch. And use my new knot tying skills.
The clove hitch was the ideal knot to use. Easy and quick to put over the pipe and easy to take off at the bottom. Luckily a few months back my brother had shown me a really quick and easy way to do the knot, he used to use it all the time when he worked as a tree surgeon.
Good to put skills into practice and save us time. My brother did say we could have added a half hitch at the top to help keep it vertical if any weren't weighted right.
Who else uses a knot for work?
My Dad taught me how to used a clove hitch and both us us used it to tie our tomatoes to the cane. Have you come across the Ashley Book of Knots? Probably need the library as it’s expensive to buy and there is some doubt about which version is copyright free on the internet!
ReplyDeleteI have used the clove hitch before but it isn't one I use really often. I think I have written this before on one of your past posts, but the two nots I use most frequently by far are the bowline and what I call a trucker's hitch. The bowline is a way to tie a loop at the end of the line that doesn't cinch tight and no matter how much weight you put on it, easy to undo. Good for tying to a handle of a bucket when lower it down from a roof is a classic example. The trucker's hitch is an easy way to create a loop in a line over a load, so you can feed the free end of the rope back through it and use it to cinch down the load tight, like a ratchet strap. It is like a bowline in that the loop can easily be shook out of the rope when you untie the load, unlike an overhand knot that many people use in that situation.
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