Wire Splice Advice

The Lyndon outing club got a little bit of maintenance work done this past week, splicing a new section of wire in where the old one was frayed, as well as adding a little bit of length to take some tension off the lift. We were there on tuesday morning ready to watch the procedure,  but a few complications and some rain put it off for another day.  In getting the wire ready for work, we had to drop the cable off of a few towers so it was low enough to work on.  I helped with this by taking a 4 foot metal bar and just prying it to the side of the sheaves.  when it dropped it went quick, and to my surprise the whole sheave assembly started whipping around like the propellers on a plane.  i wasn't really ready for that to happen and i almost lost a few toes in the process, but i would call it a lesson learned.  Once the wire was on the ground we put brackets on the wire and pulled them toward each other (1 uphill, 1 downhill) and made some slack in the line.  at this time it was raining pretty good, and there was a little too much tension on the wire since we didn't move the counter weight up so it had to be postponed until wednesday when unfortunately i couldn't make it.

Thursday we went to Stowe mountain and saw ___________(insert important guys name here), who showed us all the work going on with there new high-speed quad and patrol shack.  the new lift looked pretty awesome, and it was obvious that it was a brand spanking new one. It was a Doppelmayr made lift and the most interesting part i think was the bull-wheel assembly.  bull-wheels don't usually come in 3 separate pieces and the bull-wheel was angled down in both the top and bottom terminals.  It is a different way to detach the chair from the cable pushing the chairs along on their own separate track, while the wire is pulled downward onto the automatically tension'd bull-wheel.  after this we helped take apart some of the top assemblies from the old lift tower.  This was a real fun activity and it was cool to see what was holding all of that together.  once we removed the catwalks, and sheave assemblies from the frame we separated them into different organized piles so that Stowe mountain could find a buyer and get them ready to be shipped out.  By parting out their lift, selling the cable to one place, chairs to another, and the sheave's and tubes still without a buyer, they optimized the retail value of the old pieces.