Mechanical Advantage

It's been a while and I plan on getting caught up on this tomorrow, but here's something for today:

What happens when two horticulturists with climbing experience want to get an ugly Dish Network satellite dish out of their back yard?

You get this:

Mechanical Advantage.

Sling wrapped around the base of the satellite post, attached to a double micropulley system, tied into the closest tree.  Tom wasn't able to get up in the tree easily enough to tie it in up there so he used one of his lanyards with a steel snap, tossed it over the crotch, pulled up the pulley system and tied the end of his lanyard off down at the trunk.

Then we pulled.

Unfortunately, that mostly just brought the top of the tree to us.  

(Note - we wouldn't do this to a tree we actually cared about.  The only reason this one is still standing is because it's one of the tie-off points for our clothesline)

So we dug out more of the soil around the footer and tried again.

It was pretty clear that that was not helping.  So we dug some more.  

We were almost ready to give up, but I suggested that we try tying the system off at the trunk - more chance that we might just bend the pipe (which was already bent in another direction), but hey - what did we have to lose?   Plus it'd been a while since we'd had this much fun on a Friday evening.

So we did that and I pulled,

and pulled,

got a better grip and pulled again

and then it popped - ha!

Awesome!!

Close-ups of our system:

Then Tom decided to drag it so that it was vertical against the trunk. 

Now that was fun!!