Welcome to Strider trees.
Today, I'm going to be demonstrating how to properly set up a Notch Portawrap.
It's a real handy little device to keep you from tearing up your ropes
on the trunk of a tree.
Taken wraps around the tree.
Instead, you can wrap around this little metal bollard, and it makes for lowering
much lowering heavyweights much more smooth and consistent and reliable.
So I hope you find this useful.
Check it out.
So the Portawrap is a frequently used tool here in the tree industry.
It makes it it's allowed us to use
double braid ropes without tearing them up against the trunk of the tree.
It's designed to be used in conjunction with a block or a rigging ring
set up in order to allow for much smoother, more predictable friction.
Because very often when we're taking chunks that were rigging
big pieces, whether it's negative or standard rigging,
it's important to know how much friction you have in your system in order
to allow things to run and to minimize the load forces
both on our end points and on all the hardware involved.
So the Portawrap is a big step up from just using a rope.
So I'm going to show how to set it up properly.
This is a large portawrap.
I think there's one
there's some a few different brands, there's other ways to do it.
There's other devices that perform similarly,
but this one is fairly standard and everyone should have one.
first off, you want to make sure that the eye of your sling
in this case, I have an actual eye that's been spliced in here.
But if you don't have an eye, you can tie a bow in or some sort.
But you want to make sure the eye is tied around the long portion
of this part of the device.
This is the kinked side
and there's the long side you want the eye on the long side,
pass it around the tree and I'm going to try
to line myself up with wherever my rope is coming down
and be aware of my body positioning when I'm using this
that I can stand out of the way, any of any pieces coming down as well.
So I'm going to wrap.
The tail end of my
sling around the eye portion,
and I'm going to try to choke this down because really, I want this piece,
I want this to be snug and it's if this is flopping around a lot,
it makes it difficult to use properly and I'll demonstrate
how we take tension here.
It's called sweating the line, but it's difficult to sweat the line
effectively without this being fairly snug to the tree.
So pass your rope around.
And now we're tying the timber hitch, which basically
just consists of wrapping the slack
around the rope
a number of times, probably five or six times as appropriate.
If I had enough slack in this rope.
I would go all the way around.
Wrap it, wrap it around the device again, repeat it and then wrap the other way.
But I don't have enough slack, so all I got to do
is take some twists.
Is for.
five.
And each one of these
I do, I actually snuck down the whole system a little bit more
and make it a little bit tighter.
So there's a wrapped timber hitch.
It's not going anywhere.
This thing is nice and snug.
It's got some movement up and down, which you can't avoid having, but it's not.
There's not a lot of play that's not real loose.
It's going to make that more effective.
Now I've got my rope here trapped on this, but it doesn't really matter because I'm
going to pretend that that's the side that's hooked up over there
. Sorry to interrupt, but if you enjoy my content in this channel
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I've got a course for the beginner who's just looking at getting into
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And I've also got a series that's more tilted towards folks
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starting at new hire to take someone right off the street,
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And if that's something you'd be interested in, you can leave your
email address there on the website and I'll let you guys know first thing
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and be a contract climber and an instructor.
And combine that time to offer you the best value
to upgrade your skills with your crew on your job.
So you can do that.
You can schedule that on my website as well. Strider Tres.
Now back to the goods.
When you're using the Portawrap,
you want to start with it up.
So the climber yelled down, Hey, take a wrap.
Take two wraps
or whatever the need arises.
And this is how you would do that.
Here we've got the bent part of the Portawrap.
You're going to take a bight of the rope,
push it through the bent part
and around the little knob on the bottom.
If you'll notice
it makes a nice, smooth bend in the rope.
So this would be a half a wrap.
Climber says, hey, take a half a wrap, that's all that's necessary.
Take a whole wrap.
I'm going to take my slack.
And wrap it one whole time around, that will be one wrap.
This would be two wraps is to be three wraps.
Generally.
You would not use more than three wraps unless you're planning on locking it off,
if you've got a piece and you not need to take three wraps on it.
There's a good chance you are exceeding that 2000 pound working
load limit of this device if you need more than three wraps
to to slowly control.
Now, a lot of times,
once he's tied on, I've got a starting of a wrap.
He'll say, Well, take tension, take the slack out,
and that's where we'll use this technique called sweating the line.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to pull midline here real hard
while I'm applying some tension with my right hand.
Now pull real tight, real tight.
And then I'm going to take the slack out with my other hand.
So as I come in, I'm pulling up with my right hand.
And then I'll wrap it and capture that slack.
And if that's not enough, I'll do it again.
Sometimes I'll leave my one wrap, I'll pull, pull, pull, pull
and then
take the tension out with my other hand, as I'm releasing
that bow and arrow vectored force that I've used to take tension.
Pull pull pull Cinch down
tight.
Now I've got two wraps, so that would be a tension
to wrap.
Setup here.
Now, before the climber makes the cut, it's important that you verify with him
that when you've got enough friction for the piece he's putting on,
you want to look for yourself and see OK
based on the previous picture based on your other experience.
Do you think you've got enough friction?
And then last of all, before he makes that cut, you want to make sure
that you're slack, that you've got plenty of slack behind you.
You don't want it coming from over there.
If the slack is coming from over there, when the rope pulls through your hands,
it's going to use your hand as a friction point and heat it up really bad.
So you want the slack behind you.
You want to make sure your legs are clear and you want to make sure
you are standing clear of whatever's coming down.
Once all of that is set and you're ready to take the take
the piece, then I'll yeah, OK, ready or clear.
Or send it.
But you want to make sure that they know that you're prepared.
You also make a
note you don't want to stand right here next to the Portawrap.
It's a body's natural instinct
when things are going scary is to hold on.
And if you're standing right next to this and you hold on and it's a heavy piece,
it's really easy to get your knuckles sucked up into the Portawrap
even have it half wrapped around, and that can get messy and uncomfortable
very quickly.
So you want to make sure you stand back a little bit because
now if I panic and grab on, I'm just going to get dragged
and I'll have a moment to think about and let go of the rope.
So there's your basic use of the Portawrap.
It's a great tool.
It's super handy, and it can make rigging pieces
much safer than the old school method of just taking wraps around the tree.
I highly recommend it if you don't have any other rigging
devices like the Greeks or or these other complicated bollards.
This will get you a long way.