The problem with a peavy and ramps is that you are downhill of the log being rolled up the ramp. Smaller log, not so much an issue. Bigger log, one slip of the peavy, well, you can imagine what might happen there.
I ran into this just last week on vacation, taking out a cabbage palm. Last job of the day. Dad's trailer is full and we just needed to get the 16" diameter trunk sections (3 at 8 feet each) and then the blasted top, which is heavy as heck, covered in frond stubs and if you cut into the meat of the thing its soakin wet, fibrous, mushy and pinches the bar almost immediately. I'd popped the top out first, then the next upper section and worked my way down (felling it at once would have put it into a pond). The base cut trashed my chain, but the tree was down.
The logs we moved by attaching the fatter end to a dolly with a cam-strap. Two choker slings near the front, a man on each side and we were moving them out, the rear on wheels and the front floating just a little above ground. We had three next to the trailer with relative ease. Then came the palm head.
This sucker was odd-shaped for the dolly, clumsy and very,
very heavy. We balanced it on the dolly and with Dad pushin and me pullin we got it to the other logs at the side of the trailer. Then the task of getting them up onto the already packed trailer. Coming in from the backside was not really an option. We had to get em up and over the side. It was chin-height.
Granted, we could have re-sharpened the chain right there, made 9 or 12 pieces where there were only three, making a mess where there was no mess and humped them on and clean up the new mess, or we could get creative, get the four pieces on in 4 attempts and go home.
"So what'cha gonna do now, Kid?" Dad asks me. "We're gonna Parbuckle them on." I knew of, and had used the method before but had only recently learned of the term from a cool little book I came across at Amazon, titled
Moving Heavy Things. It was under 12 bucks. It describes in good detail how heavy things were moved before the advent of power winches and hydraulics. Moving logs, barrels, boats, blocks of granite, engines, etc. Here is the
link to that book.
Like Spidey and Ellison have brought up, parbuckling is using 2 means of mechanical advantage at once; an incline plane (ramp) and a pully to create a 2:1 mechanical advantage. In parbuckling you're rolling a round object up a hill whereby the round object you're rolling
becomes the pully.
Set the ramps. Anchor the rope or ropes (we used two) to the far side of the trailer and run them down the ramps. Roll the log over the ropes to the base of the ramps. Run the free ends of the ropes back over the logs, up the ramps to the top of the trailer. Both men get up top, each takes a ropena and you both pull, hand-over-hand as the log rolls up the slope to the top. We were amazed how simple and easy this ended up being, until the clumsy, heavy palm top. For this we hooked both slings together to make one long sling, chokered the thing, set the ramps close together, hooked both ropes to the sling through a biner and skidded the thing up the ramp. There was added frictionm of the rope through the biner and of the palm head skidding up the ramps, but it was still surprisingly easy-and safe- we were not lifting, we were pulling and we were up above the load. And we were outta there.
