The Winch

On our way to a life beyond the grid we purchased a piece of property.  The basic requirements of the property were that it be near water, be well treed and have a building of some description on it.  This property has all the requirements including a building.  The description of that building when we bought it is a story of its own but, needless to say, it was in desperate need of repair and renovation.  This is where the trees come in.  Our idea is to rebuild using the timberframe method.  Timberframe requires many large wooden members with names like bent and girt but they are all essentially 8 inch square timbers of various lengths and purpose. 

Job one in timberframe construction, if one has a well treed property, is culling the logs that will become the timbers.  This is the stage we are at, currently.  Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, one item we neglected to add as a basic requirement in our property search was an access.  The unfortunate part is that we had to have a large machine come in and make one...about a kilometer long.  The fortunate part was that we had the presence of mind to have any trees to be sacrificed at the blade of said machine be pushed to the side of the road for some, at the time, yet to be determined use.  The thought of doing timberframe and the thought of all these trees lying by the side of our new road waiting for some appropriately noble function hit us like a synchronistic two by four. 

After doing a deep woods version of an inventory, we determined that there should be enough downed trees of suitable quality to provide our timbers without actually cutting any more out of the bush.  In practice we cut to length and trim the branches from a log and pull it from the bush onto the road using our Argo and its X2 SuperWinch.  At first, it seemed that these logs, especially the maples, would be too much for this winch until it happened that wrapping the tow rope around the log allowed the winch to roll it out of the bush.  Our video shows this technique at work.

Now, there is another, perhaps more winch-savy way to add power to your winch and that is by the use of a pully.  The lever action of the pulley apparently doubles the pulling capacity of the winch.  I have yet to try this but I did put a bid on a big old orange pulley at a local auction today and, if I get it, I'll let you know how it goes.