Victorian Tree Industry Organisation

On Tuesday 28th September the VTIO in partnership with Council Arboriculture Victoria (CAV) will be running a workshop on tree hazard assessment in the beautiful grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. 

Details are still to be finalised, but we hope to be working with several leading speakers to cover a range of topics related to visual tree assesment, identifying structural weak points and discussing targets, as well as offering a guided ‘walk and talk’ around some of the interesting trees in the gardens.  Further information will be posted here as soon as it becomes available.

Registration is available using the form given here.

The dates for the Victorian Tree Climbing Competition have also been pencilled in – we hope to run the competition across the weekend of October 23rd/24th, with the venue tentatively confirmed as Warragul.  Further details and entry forms will be given here as they become available.

The full results from the recent International Tree Climbing Competition have now been posted, and are available here.

The VTIO would also like to invite members and interested parties to a meeting of the VTIO committee, to discuss the draft Climbing Guidelines. The meeting will start at 6:00pm on Tuesday 10th August, and will be held in the Arboriculture classroom of NMIT.  Please contact one of the committee if you wish to attend and require further details.

The guidelines have now been available for download from the site for approximately six months, and have previously been mailed out to all members.  We are grateful for all of the feedback and comment that has been received, and the points raised will be discussed at the meeting, as we aim to get the document out of the draft stage.  After the meeting, a revised and updated version will be sent out to all members for your further comment.

Good luck to Kiah Martin and Grant Cody, who are representing Australia in today’s International Tree Climbing Competition.  Word from the States is that the preliminaries on Saturday were rained off, forcing the whole competition into a one-day format on the Sunday.  Results will be posted here as soon as they are available.

In better news, the first revisions of the popular handouts from the recent workshop are now up online.

The PDF on Single Rope Technique now features the RAD system (pictured to the right).

Introduction to Redirects has been updated to include Tom Oldmeadow’s In-Line Retrievable Redirect (see below.)

Perhaps the biggest revision has been to Working the Angles, which has been updated with a new appendix showing graphs of the various relationships described in the text: much easier to work with on a job site than a complicated equation!

The VTIO would also like to announce that the next workshop in this series will be on Visual Tree Assessment. Date and details are still to be finalised, but keep watching this space!

The Redirect Challenge is off to a great start, with several exciting new ideas and some clever variations on old concepts.  Pictured is the basic principle behind an idea developed by leading Victorian climber Tom Oldmeadow, which he calls an “in-line retrievable redirect.”

As shown, the redirect is removed by attaching a retrieval ball to the prussik side of the climbing line, using a klemheist or similar.  By pulling slack into the climbing system on the spliced side, the ball will pass through the karabiner and catch on the clip, sliding the Ropeman off the strop and disconnecting the redirect… without having to disconnect from the climbing system!

Tom tells us that he has a later version which includes a stopper knot in the strop of the redirect.  Sliding the ball up the climbing line will ‘pull apart’ the stopper knot, and allow the Ropeman to be moved down the line.

Note that the system pictured is only the basic principle behind the redirect, and would probably not work very well set up as shown.  Pulling on the spliced side of the climbing line whilst trying to disconnect the system could cause the redirect to ‘flip’ over the branch, possibly becoming very stuck!

The setup shown below goes some way toward mitigating these problems, but in doing so encounters new difficulties.  As shown, the yellow strop which passes around the tree is made using a reasonably hardy hollow-braid.  The Ropeman (could use Kong Duck, Trango Cinch, ART Positioner or old-fashioned prussik) is actuated by a clip which is connected to the climbing line.  To prevent the Ropeman from ‘creeping’ off the end of the strop, a smooth alloy pin is pushed through the hollow-braid below the Ropeman.

As you can see from the picture, the whipping on the spliced side of the climbing line (about 1 foot up from the splice) will catch in the clip, pull the pin out of the hollow braid and slide the Ropeman off the strop.  The great thing about this variation is that disconnecting the redirect can take place as one is relocating the climbing system out of a natural redirect (please see Introduction to Redirects for details of this technique.)

The major downside is that use of the redirect depends on finding exactly the right size of clip for the particular climbing line that you are using, which may not be easy or even possible…

Thank you to everyone who has sent in redirect ideas, pictures of SRT systems or constructive criticism of any of the VTIO documents. We appreciate your input, and will do our best to include as many of your ideas as possible as soon as it is possible to update the documents.

We are particularly grateful for the comments received regarding the VTIO climbing guidelines. We hope that these will be out of the draft stage before the VTCC in October, and we value all of the input and criticism that we have received from the Victorian tree-climbing community.  Keep it coming!

The first VTIO advanced tree climbing workshop took place on Monday 5th July and was a great success.  The day was clear and warm despite some early clouds, and we were lucky enough not to get any rain.

The group completed a range of scenarios set in five different trees, and used some surprising and innovative techniques.  We also spent time indoors, looking at force vectors and discussing the VTIO Tree Climbing Guidelines.  The VTIO hopes to take these out of the draft stage by the Victorian Tree Climbing Competition (tentatively scheduled for Oct. 23rd in Warragul) and we really need feedback from the climbing community!

The handouts from the workshop (on Force Vectors, Redirects, and Single Rope Technique) are now available in PDF format from the Downloads section of the website.  These are intended to be ‘living’ documents, and will be regularly revised as techniques evolve and new equipment gets produced, so do get in touch if you have a better way of doing things or think that an old favourite which we have left out ought to be included.

Please also get your thinking caps on, and check out the Redirect Challenge, in the Redirects download.  The VTIO is offering a prize of $300 for the best new redirect plan sent in by the VTCC, in late October.  Ged Reynolds is currently leading the field with an innovative variation on the ‘Ropeman Redirect’.

The VTIO would like to thank  the City of Boroondara for their invaluable help and support in making this workshop such a success.  In addition, Cannings of Mt Waverley were ready as always to give their support for the industry, and provided the sponsorship which let us hold this event.  The ATRAES group will soon have several of the SRT systems discussed and demonstrated, as well as a custom-spliced redirect, available for sale through their website.   Even if you missed the workshop, you should take the time to check out this exciting new gear!

The VTIO is also looking forward to running another workshop between now and the climbing competition.  Details are still to be confirmed, but both ‘Aerial Rescue’ and ‘Visual Tree Assessment’ are strong candidates.  Keep checking the website for more details closer to the time.