This last weekend, I gave a neighbour a hand to remove some Leylandii stumps from his drive. He had hired a chain saw and had taken all the trees down to what he felt was a tidy 18". No 6ft stumps left for leverage, no side branches to tie onto, just smooth short tapered stumps. The root crowns were over 2ft across, and with no trunk to apply leverage with, we had to dig around the crowns and cut through the roots as we exposed them. Tools were a spade, an axe, a truck, two 4ft lengths of 3x4, a chain and a length of old hauser I had found on the beach. It is laid synthetic (possibly polyprop) and has had such a battering that it is totally soft and 'lifeless'. It was probably much thinner when new, but now it has 'fluffed out' to about an inch - inch and a half. I used it because it cost me nowt and I thought whatever I used was likely to get bust at some stage.
Throughout the day I used just two knots - the KC Hitch on the tapered stumps and the Slippery Hitch (ABOK #82) to hitch to the truck.
The KC Hitch 'slipped' only once. On that occasion, the pull was so great that the whole stump was debarked by the wicked grip of the 'KC'. Once the bark was stripped, the stump was shiny white and as slippery as if we had greased it. I fetched the chain, but I had little hope that we could fix it to the stump - I had visions of having to try to put a loop around the root crown. However, I put the chain onto the slippery stump using the KC Hitch. It was sloppy, but as I opened up the first scissor loop the chain bit hard into the wood and held firm. We looped the chin over the 3x4 'A' frame and tied it with the rope to the truck. As the truck put on tension, the scissor section opened further and the anchor part bit into the wood so hard that the links were bedded in by nearly a quarter inch. A dozen lops with the axe later and the stump popped out like it was on springs.
This was the first time I had put the KC Hitch to real work and it performed like a real dream. I made one small change to the hitch from that shown in the earlier forum post. Under hard tension, the closing knot would become tight and in this old rope was hard to release. I considered making a sling out of a piece of the old rope in order to make the KC Sling Hitch variant which has no problem with release. I decided not to because a) I never like to cut a piece of rope, even old worn-out stuff and b) the stumps were so short I would probably have had a job getting the sling hitch on the stumps. I finally solved the problem by passing the loose end in Slippery Hitch fashion back under itself turning it into a slipped KC Hitch. Even though this fix was moving up the stump as the scissor opened under tension, the end was held reliably in place until tension was slacked off, then it released the 'KC' in seconds.
Having worked now with the KC Hitch I can see it is possible that it could pick up a few nicknames. The first could be the 'scissor hitch' from the way that scissor action opens up and racks on the grip, and the second is the 'indefatigable' or 'indi' because this brute just never gives up.
Oh, and that old piece of beach rope worked just as tirelessly, and is now back in the shed, having earned its place neatly coiled and hung on a peg instead of just being dumped on the floor in a bag. Is it silly to admire and respect a bit of old rope? I often wonder what tales it could tell.
