Cabling and Bracing

[EdenT]

Well say your static system provides a better grounding in a lightning storm and a bolt of lightning hits the tree and a branch breaks off and lands on the school beneath and destroys the building.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!

As our Myrtaceaen brother stated -

Exactly the same thing as if it had a static failsafe installed on it, that couldn't quite catch that limb? Come on what a senseless hypothetical pile of crap! :bang: What if!?

I guess you missed the part in Cabling and Bracing 101, and reiterated by several 'professionals' on this forum where they said you have to maintain and inspect any system regularly.
ET

 

[jomoco]

Well if you want to believe that a branch falling onto your dynamic stuff is an unlikely event in this biz, you are certainly free to believe that mate.

jomoco

 

[EdenT]

I guess you missed the part in Cabling and Bracing 101, and reiterated by several 'professionals' on this forum where they said you have to maintain and inspect any system regularly.
ET

If you want to deny whats in black and white in front of you, you are certainly free to deny, mate.

 

[jomoco]

If you want to deny whats in black and white in front of you, you are certainly free to deny, mate.

I'm talkin about the real world in the trees, not the paper world in either your or your customer's filing cabinet mate.

jomoco

 

[EdenT]

I guess you missed the part in Cabling and Bracing 101, and reiterated by several 'professionals' on this forum where they said you have to maintain and inspect any system regularly.
I guess you missed the part in Cabling and Bracing 101, and reiterated by several 'professionals' on this forum where they said you have to maintain and inspect any system regularly.
I guess you missed the part in Cabling and Bracing 101, and reiterated by several 'professionals' on this forum where they said you have to maintain and inspect any system regularly.
I guess you missed the part in Cabling and Bracing 101, and reiterated by several 'professionals' on this forum where they said you have to maintain and inspect any system regularly.
I guess you missed the part in Cabling and Bracing 101, and reiterated by several 'professionals' on this forum where they said you have to maintain and inspect any system regularly.



You are talking about a branch being hung up in a tree off the dynamic cabling (see I actually read what you write). You think people don't look at tree's after a storm and notice the top half is inverted. You the installer are meant to advise the client to watch out for things like this and hopefully have a maintenance contract that includes annual inspection. Incidentally branches can, and are probably more likely to hang up on a rigid steel cable too and then fall when they break. INSPECTION AND MAINTENANCE OF ANY SYSTEM IS THE KEY TO ONGOING SAFETY AND SUCCESS!

 

[treeseer]

Thanks to our colleagues down under for joining the drum circle with the energizer bunny and his hyperbole and hypotheticals. Reminds me of cross-examination by by a desparate attorney. It can be fun in the chair, deconstructing the false premises, etc.; after all one is on the clock there.

But doing it here just for sport,

Lightning--I've seen lightning damage jump over to steel hardware, follow it into the heart of a tree, and blow it apart. dam pic is in there somewhere... I'm glad this came up--we all need to include in our disclaimers that any tree with steel installed should also have an lps installed, or risk the tree being blown apart by the system that was designed to protect it from failure!

Then, it's not a wild leap, but more of a bunny hop , that electricity through a big honkin through-bolt fastened with nuts and washers and treegrips would be more likely to destroy the tree than a cable with fasteners only on the ends. But that would be another 12-page thread (please stop copying entire previous messages willy-nilly!)

Carry on, gents. :yourock:

 

[treevet]

Thanks to our colleagues down under for joining the drum circle with the energizer bunny and his hyperbole and hypotheticals. Reminds me of cross-examination by by a desparate attorney. It can be fun in the chair, deconstructing the false premises, etc.; after all one is on the clock there.

But doing it here just for sport,

Lightning--I've seen lightning damage jump over to steel hardware, follow it into the heart of a tree, and blow it apart. dam pic is in there somewhere... I'm glad this came up--we all need to include in our disclaimers that any tree with steel installed should also have an lps installed, or risk the tree being blown apart by the system that was designed to protect it from failure!

Then, it's not a wild leap, but more of a bunny hop , that electricity through a big honkin through-bolt fastened with nuts and washers and treegrips would be more likely to destroy the tree than a cable with fasteners only on the ends. But that would be another 12-page thread (please stop copying entire previous messages willy-nilly!)

Carry on, gents. :yourock:

gibberish

 

[murphy4trees]

Myself, I question the merit of using J-lags, as they rely on healthy wood to hold the threads. If the wood was all healthy in the branches getting "fixed", it probably would not need the cabling system. \.

That is an ignorant statement... co-dominant stems with included bark are the vast majority of cases that call for a cable. Most of these have good wood for J-lags... Industry standards call for thru bolts on wood over 10" in diameter... So j lags can be used in wood 10" and under....WELL if you are going up 2/3 of the way to the branch tips, you should be in wood 10" or less in all but the biggest of trees, at least around here where trees go to 100-120' ... The reason thru bolts are needed is becasue climbers lack the skill, knowledge or care to install cables high, where they belong.. SO low cables require thru bolts... If it was up to me, i'd write the standard, that cables should be installed a minimun of 2/3 and preferably 4/5 the distance OR in 8-10" wood... WHICHEVER IS HIGHER....

Installing cable in wood less than 10" precludes the need for thru bolts, though I often use them anyhow, just because I think they hold better, especially in big tres with high value and important obstacles....

I have never seen a tree that was cabled too high?

Have you?

 

[treevet]

I have never seen a tree that was cabled too high?

Have you?

If nobody else is gonna take a shot at this I will Murph....

Let's go to the very extreme to illustrate why there can be a TOO high...

If we put a cable between 2 leaders up in the 3 inch dia stuff near the top

The limb/s supported when moving will likely break the material near attachment.

You will get very little support and restriction of movement because of the flexing allowed by the thinness of the attachment area and the restriction of movement and support is what we are after.

If you take your attachment point down closer to the 2/3 area from the crotch you get more and more of what you need and when you pass that point, like you accurately stated, you get too much torque which will often pull out or break cabling material.

 

[Corymbia]

Not even close mate.

Say a fair sized branch above your dynamic system were to fail in a storm, and fall down onto your synthetic line, and get caught up there, rubbing against it everytime the wind blows, for a whole year or two before being discovered and removed?

Can it take the friction for one year? Two?

How would it compare to galvinized steel in that extremely likely scenario my friend?

jomoco

Well you have me there!

I can only hope that someone would notice the big green and eventually brown dangling thing in the tree called a broken branch. Clearly static lines are sold to some people who don't care about their trees or who stop caring about the trees because once that static line is in not even a tornado or a 747 will bring it down.

You seem insistent on hypothetical garbage so what do you say if an adjacent tree falls on your horizontal limb that has a static brace, causing the top to break out of the tree, falling across electrical conductors. The cable causes a short and drops molten metal causing a fire resulting in the loss of a 2.7 billion dollars worth of real estate and 147 lives

I am happy to debate a a scientific level but I cannot waste time considering what happens if a static brace fails and is catapulted into the air and is hit by Marine One, resulting in an all out atomic war because they thought it was a deliberate attack by the Chinese who manufactured the cable.

Please don't dignify this garbage with a response! This sort of hypothetical crap is crap regardless of the source and you can always find more of them.

By the way I used my 20 tonne fabric sling today and again it didn't snap! Tensile strength is tensile strength ... regardless from what it is made! Now what were the problems with my calculations? I missed that post!

 

[jomoco]

You will have to excuse my asking but how does a dynamic system weaken anything?

When it comes to tensile strength, who cares what the brace is made out as long as it is appropriately selected for the load involved.

It weakens the limb by giving it support, by reducing the range of motion that all the other unsupported limbs are exposed to and react to by building reaction wood.

You should care very much what your cabling and bracing is made from when it's exposed to hostile elements 24/7, be it sun, wind, snow, rain, abrasion or temperature extremes, the system once installed has to be able to take it, and do so for 2-3 decades without annual nursemaiding adding to it's cost.

The old lady hanging bowling balls on springs off the lower laterals of her citriadora euc understands how to strengthen a limb far better than you and every quack selling this dynamic snake oil.

That lady's profound wisdom got me to wandering why nurseries don't condition their juvenile seedlings to a far greater degree than they do currently.

Like a wind-up rotation device that would very slowly rotate a containerized sapling in front of a fan?

jomoco

 

[Ekka]

The old lady hanging bowling balls on springs off the lower laterals of her citriadora euc understands how to strengthen a limb far better than you and every quack selling this dynamic snake oil.

 

[treeseer]

Hey Jon,

Maybe if you hang bowling balls from your ears you will hear better!

:monkey:

 

[jomoco]

Come on Guy, we're in the commercial arborist forum mate.

I've set out a very basic fundamental case that the current forms of dynamic cabling commercially available directly contradict their intended purpose, and only serve to exploit a customer's fear and lack of arboricultural knowledge.

Cabling can't be justified without an identified fault in the tree's structure period.

If you're selling a failsafe, then call it such, and quit pretending you're doing the tree any favors by installing it.

The lady with the bowling balls can actually remove her system from her tree and factually and truthfully claim that she has strengthened that tree. These dynamic snake oil salesmen can't make that same claim honestly no matter how many papers they write claiming otherwise.

I've set out my reasoning, and patiently await your reasoned rebuttal.

jomoco

 

[Ekka]

Cabling can't be justified without an identified fault in the tree's structure period.

If you're selling a failsafe, then call it such, and quit pretending you're doing the tree any favors by installing it.

Then according to your terminology you either install steel failsafes, dynamic fail-safes or no fail-safes.... which is it?

Hey, did you read about the Turnbuckle a newly recorded phenomenon in Eucalypts?

Here check some of it out, pretty stupid these trees are eh best we tie them up with steel. :hmm3grin2orange:

 

[jomoco]

Uh, the answer would be no failsafes, unless a structural fault is identified, at which point I would use high strength galvinized steel components to help support and isolate the fault so it can callous over and compartmentalize over time.


jomoco

 

[treeseer]

ET look at the archives here for some of Jon's excellent work.

Jon you concept of "fault" seems a bit more black and white than reality. Consider:

A big fork with included bark and or rot. Movement will aggravate, static preferred.

A big fork with a branch bark ridge and no rot, but an overextended end that cannot be corrected by pruning. Movement will mitigate, dynamic preferred. this is all spelled out quite well in the sherrill catalog.

Jon you say that static cable can help compartmentalize a defective fork. I do not understand how this happens; please explain?

Good link to an excellent article from a mag that does have some good stuff now and then; be sure to check the April issue. :angel: . Trees do know what they are doing; we need to follow their lead, and not impose rigidity where dynamism is needed. One size does not fit all.

 

[Corymbia]

Uh, the answer would be no failsafes, unless a structural fault is identified, at which point I would use high strength galvinized steel components to help support and isolate the fault so it can callous over and compartmentalize over time.


jomoco

That makes good sense then ... your clients wait until a junction starts to split. Most of these limbs actually fail and fall but you get to some before they fail completely. (It must be hard in such poor economic times ... have you thought about going to Mexico to work Then you correctly suggest steel (or a sthil) to try and sort the mess out ... and I would agree in that situation that steel is the better choice.

Fortunately my clients like to prevent failure starting and because it is cost effective they can have dynamic systems installed that reduce the likelihood of failure in the first place and then replace and or upgrade the system every 10 years or so.

the system once installed has to be able to take it, and do so for 2-3 decades without annual nursemaiding adding to it's cost.

And I guess you only prune once every 30 years as well. Can I sent you a food parcel Hope the economy gets better for you soon

 

[murphy4trees]

Why not just leave the steel cables a bit loose... let them hang enough so the tree has to support itslef when it is in full leaf... think about it... what is the difference between that and a dynamic system.. how much will the dynamic system allow the tree to move before it stops it..

If you've ever been in a cabled tree on a windy day, you've felt that snap as the cables goes taught and the tree jerks abrubtly to a stop... Probably not so much snap to a dynamic system.. in my thinking, you'd have to show that the tree is damaged by that snap in some way, (which I doubt), to show any improvement in dynamic systems... the other advantage is that the there is no need to drill holes in the tree, which could be important, especially on limbs with existing decay... otherwise, what other advantage does a dynamic system provide????

OH ya silly me... its the $$$.... Somebody is making money on the dynaic systems...

and the old advertising claiming that dynaic is superior because it can be installed by one person, doesn't hold up to real world conditions.. a steel cable can easily be installed by one climber, and it is usually better to have two climbers in the tree anyhow, to get the cable at the proper height..

 

[outofmytree]

Why not just leave the steel cables a bit loose... let them hang enough so the tree has to support itslef when it is in full leaf... think about it... what is the difference between that and a dynamic system.. how much will the dynamic system allow the tree to move before it stops it..

If you've ever been in a cabled tree on a windy day, you've felt that snap as the cables goes taught and the tree jerks abrubtly to a stop... Probably not so much snap to a dynamic system.. in my thinking, you'd have to show that the tree is damaged by that snap in some way, (which I doubt), to show any improvement in dynamic systems... the other advantage is that the there is no need to drill holes in the tree, which could be important, especially on limbs with existing decay... otherwise, what other advantage does a dynamic system provide????

OH ya silly me... its the $$$.... Somebody is making money on the dynaic systems...

and the old advertising claiming that dynaic is superior because it can be installed by one person, doesn't hold up to real world conditions.. a steel cable can easily be installed by one climber, and it is usually better to have two climbers in the tree anyhow, to get the cable at the proper height..

To quote an old western "It aint the fall that gits em, its the sudden stop at the bottom."

The difference in systems is all in the name Daniel. One restricts movement, the other allows it. Both by intent and both useful in different circumstances.

A big fork with included bark and or rot. Movement will aggravate, static preferred.

A big fork with a branch bark ridge and no rot, but an overextended end that cannot be corrected by pruning. Movement will mitigate, dynamic preferred.

As to installation time, arborists I know who have used both steel and dynamic cables say that the fixing of dynamic cabling is faster and definately easier on your hands! Cabling solo sounds like a lot of work. Especially if you drop the damn fid!