Project #1 from DaveO: Lifting tripod
We had some ornamental evergreen shrubs in the yard that had stopped being ornamental- at one time I’m sure they were tame enough but they outgrew their plot and became scrubby nasty eyesores. After digging one out manually, which turned out to be a *lot* of work, I came up with this labor saving idea: pull them out by the roots.
I ginned up this tripod and used the connecting bolt at the top to hang the cable puller. Stand the tripod over the shrub, wrap some chain around the plant as close to the ground as possible, and start pulling. The horizontal members are bolted to allow disassembly for storage; feet are welded on to prevent the legs from driving into the ground during the pulling process. Cost was next to nothing: keyhole slots in the steel reveal its bedframe origins; the cable puller was already part of the inventory; a few dollars for the chain and hook at the Home Deep.
This worked out very well- I cleared out the remaining 6 or 8 plants in an afternoon with much less effort (but the same amount of poison ivy and snakes), and since then have lent it to neighbors who were removing plants. Another neighbor used it to pull a tree limb out of the ground: a falling tree drove the limb three feet into the ground and the neighbor couldn’t remove it any other way. Made in USA, no patents pending.
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