the rope was used to hoist up the antenna they installed....if they just cut it at the top when they were done with it it would fall a few feet and get caught in the tower, taking ages to slowly get it out all the way down. so you tension the rope away form the tower, and snap it so it flies away form the structure, instead of in it
damn dude, you're freaking brave just chillin' at 1,000 feet. I have an extreme phobia of heights. I can't even really climb on top of a house, which is only 10 feet high. So, thumbs up for this video.
@britdemo We used this 1/2" rope to hoist up a new digital antenna for the tv station that uses the tower to broadcast in that area. If we just dropped the rope out of the tower, it would have gotten tangled up and taken forever to get it completely out of the tower. So, they put tension on it and "snapped" it out.
Christian Wells.... I've been doing tower work for 13 years and about 8 years ago the guy I was training dropped the rope from around 400 ft and it blew about 30-40 feet off the tower and wrapped around the 4th guyed wire thank God it was only around 400 ft because I wasn't going to let him go out and get it and we couldn't leave it so I wrapped both fall arresters around the guyed wire and shimmy all the way down to it and got it ... Unfortunately I couldn't shimmy back up to the tower so I ended up popping it and had to shimmy all the way down to the ground and then climb back up another 600 ft to where we were working at that point ... After shimmying down roughly 400 ft of cable I was whooped and my arms were completely ate up and tore up ... I didn't even have the energy to be mad at him when I got up to them... But , he carried the rope up by himself the next couple of jobs though for payback.... Haha ... Y'all be careful...
@CptSkyler My crew told me that the majority of the rope ended up in a pile about 100' from the tower, and a portion of the rope snaked back towards the tower. All in all, it worked out really well and saved a lot of time.
it's so cool to see a rope drop to the ground. I've never been this high, but I've dropped them from the beams of reliant stadium, (bout 250 feet.) the way it instantly goes from a straight and taut to no weight at all is just cool lol. and the sound is incredible. :)
Kevin is doing the cutting, Will is running the camera, Brandan is running the cathead, and I am sitting here in front of my computer getting all woozy with sweaty palms. Good luck to you guys, you can keep your jobs, I really don't want one like that!
I popped the rope today from the rail of a 250ft water tower and it actually all went into the small husky box it stays in. Worked perfectly but there was like no wind.
at 1000ft doing it by hand wouldn't be enough tension, plus at least a little bit of the rope inevitably will hit the guy snapping on the ground before he can run out of the way and that much rope will beat the shit out of his shoulders and head if it lands on him. way too dangerous. 1000ft of 1/2in. rope is a couple hundred lbs.
