Welcome to Stider Trees today.
Going to be talking about a couple of friction hitches that I like to use.
We use them for climbing systems.
We use them for anchors on in like a rigging system
for making a sliding friction capture.
Progress captures a bunch of ways to use these things.
And so it's good to know a few of them because some work better with one rope
or another.
We're going to have I've got like a complete diagram
set up for these knots and a number of others in my climbing
one on one class that's available for free on my website, stridertrees.com .
And I'll go over a couple of these as well on my live Part-Time Arborist Academy
course coming up in another month to along with a number of other methods
for managing friction when you're climbing.
So hopefully you'll find this useful.
And here we go.
All right.
So I'm going to start really simply here.
Friction
hitches used for a bunch of different reasons.
But I'll start with the kind of like the beginning friction hitch that
like rock climbers use. And this is why these things are often
called prusik cords instead of hitch cords.
It's this first hitch. It's called the prusik.
Now, this is a basic three coil prusik.
Wrap the hitch cord around the rope three times.
And I'm right now I'm kind of dressing the knot
so that notice where where our attachment point is our carabiner.
It comes out the middle
and then the coils go out and they're not overlapping each other.
And you kind of work most of the slack out.
And what happens is, like all the friction hitches,
if I pull here on this cord, the hitch doesn't move.
I but if I push on the knot, I can actually slide
the whole knot up and down and is really handy.
So, for example, if I put a
if I have a mechanical advantage system here or if I've got a pulley here,
I can do my mechanical advantage and take up my slack.
But then I can actually slide the whole hitch up more and I've got more slack.
So I can adjust my mechanical advantage system, for one example.
But this is a basic prusik.
It works symmetrically in both directions, no matter which way you pull it holds.
And no matter which way you slide it, it can slide.
So that one more time here actually tying it,
it's really easy to tie.
I like to leave the caribiner on there,
but basically you just take your carabiner on
and you wrap the loop around the outside of it.
One to three times, and then you dress it up
it's going to look like that when you're all done.
You can do four wraps if you're going on something more intense,
but any more than that and you're just kind of playing around
So the next hitch I would like to show is called A Climb Heist.
It's again, a really simple hitch similar to the prusik,
except it acts in one direction.
So I like to use this hitch when I'm attaching pulleys
to a rope to set up an adjustable mechanical advantage system.
So this one, I'm taking the bight of the the bight of my hitch cord
or my prusik cord and I'm just going to wrap it
in the direction opposite of how I'm going to pull.
So I'm just going to wrap it.
I'll do three wraps,
straight up the cord, and then I take my carabiner
or the two ends of the hitch cord and pass it through that bight.
And so you get something that looks like this
three wraps up and then it comes back through.
And this is the direction of pull.
Now, this is going to give me a little bit more manageable friction
so that if I were to load it really hard, it's a little bit easier to release
because I've got more coils involved in this situation.
And so it distributes the the force of the of the bight
and the squeeze on the rope a little bit more evenly.
And so but it only acts in one direction and is not advisable.
It's not designed to pull the opposite way.
It's kind of a one directional
hit, not hitch.
It's very easy to do
Now, the next couple of hitches I want to show
you are more specifically designed for climbing systems.
So and in a moving rope system, a DRT or DDRT system
but even a single rope system, if you're using a rope wrench,
you are often using a friction hitch of a different sort
to attach to to manage the friction of your system.
So here I've kind of like got a loose moving rope system
and I'm going to just attach this end to my bridge
just so you guys can see that I've got both ends.
Now, back in the day, and if you learn from a really old school climber,
the knot they used to use was a Blakes hitch.
Now you can use a Blakes hitch with nothing but the rope
you're climbing on And I'll demonstrate that.
I think I'll demonstrate that first and do that work.
So the old school way to climb
that only involve the Blakes hitch was really quite simple.
So a lot of times they didn't even have a ring.
But we're just going to pretend this carabiner is a nice ring.
I've passed my climb line up and over a union
and I've got two ends that are moving, and they both need to be tied to me.
So what I do is I take about an arms length of slack here,
and I'm going to tie it to the ring
using something simple like a a.
I'm actually going to use a clove hitch here.
So I'll clove hitch that to my ring.
And then I've got this tail of my rope
that I'm going to then use to tie the Blakes hitch.
Now, the Blakes hitch that I like to tie, I'm a little bit a smaller guy.
I only usually need four or five coils depending on the rope.
So I'll wrap this thing.
Let's go five times around going up.
One, two, three, four, five.
And then what I'm going to do I'm going to bring the tail down,
crossing over that bottom leg behind this,
and then up two coils and out
out the front
also and try and get a little more slack here.
Now, right now, I'm just dressing the knot
and generally I would finish this with like an overhand
not or a fisherman stopper knot or something
because this has the potential to work loose.
And if you're going to climb on this, which I don't recommend,
you would have a longer a little longer tail here.
The idea is that it's a good not to know because in a pickle
I can belay out of a tree using just this, like I don't need any hardware.
I can literally just use the end of my rope with no I know
hardware and I can safely belay out of the tree Again,
this is another one of those knots where if I pull here on this side,
it just cinches down and locks it in place.
But if I pull in the top of the knot, it releases
all right.
So that's that's a Blakes hitch now has more modern types
who still learned how to use hitches.
We often use what I like to call closed systems.
Now, I'm going to show you here with this.
Instead of using this as a closed system,
you can actually use it like a Blakes just the same.
I can take my eye here and do my five
coils up the rope
come down
behind and then back up through
back up through those bottom two coils.
I could get it in there
and this is what they would call, you know, a split tail system.
So that the downside of that other method I showed you where you're using
all the same rope is that this part that's involved in the friction,
which ends up getting worn out really, really quickly,
it gets because it's receiving a lot of abrasion up and down the rope.
But if you do it with a separate rope on a carabiner,
you can get a more friction, more abrasion resistant cord.
And so it doesn't wear out the end of your rope.
You're not just shortening a rope as it wears out but it also allows you
to disconnect it from yourself more easily,
you know, to pass around a tree or to move it around in the canopy
So this is a superior system to what we were doing before,
but it essentially is still has the risk of being open ended.
Right.
This could potentially work its way through with this sewn eye.
It probably wouldn't, but
this is still not quite as safe as the next one I'm going to show you.
But it's it's a similar it's it's a Blakes hitch.
It's the same essentially the same functioning system
just with a separate cord used
as the not least for the not So this next one I'm going to show you
is again, functions the same in a moving rope system, but it's a distel hitch.
And this hitch is a closed hitch in that both ends of the rope
are fastened to the caribiner in a closed off way.
So they can't actually come loose unless the carabiner comes free.
So this one starts about the same.
I'm going to do four or five wraps up, I think on this.
Usually I climb on four, then I come down
and I'm going to cross over.
But instead of going this way and then coming up, like for the Blakes
I'm actually just going to cross over and then go around in the same direction.
I bend wrapping and do like a little half hitch here.
So now I've got this little cross where the,
the end of the ropes coming out on both sides
and I would
attach that both ends of that to my carabiner.
So this again form similar functions, the same as this will
the same as other hitch.
Nice little friction hitch.
Generally, if I were building a climb system,
I like to have a little pulley right here
so that it makes it a lot easier to tend to slack.
But that's another video for another day.
So once again, that's the Distel hitch.
I'll show you guys that one more time.
I like this.
It's super simple to tie. Really easy.
You wrap 1-2, three, four, depending on how much cord you got,
depending on how big your rope is, maybe five wraps.
I'm actually going to go for here,
cross over Keep still wrapping the same direction and do a little half hitch
Really reliable, good functioning.
knot.
The problem is the more you sit in it and tension it and then release it.
This one tends to work itself tighter and tighter
and so that can be kind of a that can be annoying.
You have to actually stop and loosen it up when you're climbing around
every so often.
So I'm going to show you another knot aside from the distel.
And this one we call, I've always called the Michoacan
I think technically it's called the Michoacan
again starts very similarly.
I'll probably take four or five wraps going up,
then I'll bring this down.
And then like the Blakes hitch, instead of going around this way,
like the distel, I'm going to go crossover, go back behind,
and then I'm going to bring it up underneath.
Just that one bottom coil
and then I've got it coming forward.
So it makes this little crossover here.
Crossover in the back.
And what I found is that the Michoacan doesn't tend
to bind up and get tighter and tighter and tighter quite as badly as the distal.
And this is probably my preferred hitch.
It's really simple. It's reliable,
and I really like it.
So that's the Michoacan for you.
Once again, I'll show you that one more time here.
So you get your at least three,
but I've got four full wraps going up
going to cross over here,
go round behind this other
behind the rope and then up underneath that bottom coil
and then back down
So once again, something you would lock off
both hands with the hitch, both ends of the hitch to the carabiner.
You go now that
will hold you up in the tree, but you can release it
to let yourself down.
But if you pull here, it locks off
and there you go.
That's a few friction hitches for you.
Hopefully you found that useful. There's many more.
There's a lot of great
applications for the variety of them.
But you got to know a few because not every rope and hitch cord
combination will work with every not so sometimes the first one you set up just
you can't make it work.
But if you tried it for not, sometimes you can make that work.
And so it's good to know if you
there's a little bit of history for you and climb safe out there, guys.
And again, check out Stridertrees.com .
I've got the Part Time Arborist Academy coming up that's going to be awesome.
Only 30 spots available so you got to get those while you can.
That's coming up in a month
and we're going to be giving you all the info
you need to figure out how to start kind of a part time tree service gig.
Everything from the
basic equipment, the basic skills necessary
and like, actually do some Hands-On stuff, and this is going to be a live course.
You can interact with me in the video while i'm talking about it.
It's going to be a live class.
And then the last section we're going to talk about the business side of things.
Doing proper bids, pricing yourself, all sorts of the more monetary aspects of it
that are less tangible and applicable to tree work, but still totally necessary.
So check it out on my website Stridertrees.com
and hopefully I'll catch you next time here on youtube. Thanks.