The Fool on the Hill: Flying out the hayloft

Ever since I built the cattle shed, and added the derrick to the front of it to allow bales to be hoisted up, I've thought that would make a very cool place to do a suspension. But it's also an extremely dodgy place to do a suspension, because the derrick is a Douglas fir beam 150x50mm cantilevered out of the front of the shed, with a pigtail hook screwed into it. Vertically below the derrick is a concrete ramp. Any fall onto that ramp could cause serious injury.

So there are two problems here: one is having a sufficient safety line in case the primary lift hoist fails — either because the tackle itself fails (unlikely) or the derrick fails (somewhat less unlikely); and the other is getting the person to be suspended up there. The answer to the second problem is in essence simple: you could just hoist the person up from the ground. But, given that there's a doorway right there, you don't have to.

And the doorway provides the solution to the safety problem: by attaching a safety line to the roof structure, which is very strong, we can guarantee that if the primary hoist fails the worst that happens is that the suspended person slams into the front of the building — which will hurt but is unlikely to be fatal.

But once we've got the principle of the safety line, it's obviously got to be adjustable so that you can guarantee your suspended person will not hit the ground. So it's almost got to be a tackle. And if it's a tackle, it might as well be a tackle suitable for hoisting the person off the ground.

So this gives us a neat solution:

The person to be suspended can be rigged and hoisted in (relative) comfort and safety in the hayloft — on the hoist shown as the secondary hoist in the diagram. Once they're suspended, and comfortable, and everyone is ready, you connect the primary hoist, and pull on that. This pulls the person towards the doorway, and, as you continue to pull on the primary hoist and judiciously slacken the secondary hoist, the person ends up hanging from the derrick outside the building, at more or less the same height as they'd been hanging in the building.

You do need two strong, reliable, trustworthy people to work the hoists, and they do need to know what they're doing.

For the benefit of the photographs we put a single rope tail between the lower block on the secondary hoist and the karabiner to which the person suspended is attached. This line is visible in the photographs but is not intrusive.

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