Slings and making firewood
John Paul Sanborn, you are truly a Master. Your appreciation of slinggage goes most appreciated my myself. Yes, slinging multiple limbs together and doing a 'gang' lower, I love that, man.
If you lower the gang, you lower along with it your slings. I use that more as a plan B, or a Special Ops alternative.
I still much prefer the 'Sling Cut Unsling Throw' method, because you get to keep the sling. 30" is a length where you can choker any limb, up to the approx 6" 'size limit' , and still have length enough to stay well away from your saw blade.
Here's how an average good sling might go (this could be shown in TWO SECONDS of video. Ok, the sling has a looped eye end, and at the other end of the 30" length is a nicely weighted stainless steel biner. Holding the eye end, you sendthe weighted enarcing up and under the limb. If done just right, the caribinered end of the sling swings up from the underside, up, around, in temporary orbit, reaches,.. 12:00, apex, starts coming back down at 360 degrees lands PLOP in your hand. You're holding the eyed end, still, and youOne-handed feed the biner through the eye. Give it a quick, authoritative way, and you have chokered your limb, with finnesse.
Now you're holding the stainless steel caribiner in hand. I often, for fun, will set the biner tick-tocking back and forth from suspension. While it's swinging to and fro, I have both hands free to start up my 346.
Like John Paul, and many of you others, we like yo do a little face cut in most of our limbs. We might start the back cut with the saw, but like to stop short, shut off the saw, pull out our Silky Saw, and finish the backcut with one hand, while maintaining control of the sling, and thus limb, with the other. It goes the right direction you want it, and snaps off when you expect it to. Pull it up to you, un-choker it and toss it onto the tarps and ideally, in front of the chipper.
Again, this is limbage up to, but less than, about 6" diameter. For firewood, I will reply directly to the wise words of JPS:
Using F&F dogleash slings for light rigging is not a problem, I do question using it on big wood when you cant even make an educated guess as to SWL.
First, what the heck is F and F? Fido and Fleabag? OHHhhhh.... Farm and Fleet! Yer funny. And yess, light rigging only. In fact the 30" length is self-limiting on size; it'll only choker around a 12" round of wood and still leave enough length of sling to hold, on to, or to clip onto your (spliced end)lowering line. I would is this on 12" diameter pieces that are 16" long (that would be max for me), sling it, cut ut, unchoker it and toss it onto the target zone, which for me are a series of 4 pieces of 2' x 2' 3/4" ply, three tires, roped in a tiight triangle, and a thick 4' x 4' square of this thick, looks like truck bed lining, rubber, somebody told me it was industrial conveyor belt material, which seems likely.
Anyway, this system rocks for me most of the time. I do lower stuff, depending on the situation, but my rules for myself in the tree are simple. Get the material on to the ground, being low impact and controlled, Climb Safe, and do really good work.