Last week I was on a bit of a pulley jag showing some footage whereby you can achieve some mechanical advantage with levers and especially with pulleys. I got a tsk from my pal Russ saying that I shd have mentioned the eSpanish windlass as another way of making things move. I have mentioned the eSpanish windlass in the context of applying a torniquet to a sheep's leg. It is a really nifty appropriate technology tool for, say, tightening up a length of fence and Young Bolivar and I used them when building the woodshed last Summer to force the telephone-pole uprights upright. to . This is how the thing is made, with diagrams and safety notes.
The same principal is at work with a windlass winch, except instead of the rope shortening by twisting about itself as with the Spanish, the slack of the rope is taken up by being wound around a log. Another log at right angles applies the necessary leverage. In using this tool it is not necessary to behave like a neanderthal misogynist git who is (marginally) politer to his dog than his wife and various hapless twigs.
But there's more! Here is a flip-flop winch which allows a single person to set up and use a system with a rope and two stout sticks to shift a heavy object. Or two stout sticks and a couple of fit young Germans
And then there is a Chinese windlass where the key for leverage is a difference in the circumference of the axle. Never heard of that: very clever the Chinese.
All those solutions to weight moving are temporary examples of bricolage with what is available at hand in the forest. It you want to make a more permanent capstan with a curious mixture of modern tools and medieval technology check this video out.
Last week one of the links made a comparison with the Man Who Planted Trees. Here is another such story from an island in the Brahmaputra [prev]. The importance of trees in stabilising riverine banks is illustrated in this report on slumping in the levees downstream from Oroville.
Ha ha, that's telling me!!
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