ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Best hitch for wire pull?

We had to hitch a set of 500 mcm feeders and the hitch we used damaged the insulation on the wire,Does anyone out there recommend a good hitch that will not do this?

A Monkeys Foot or Monkeys fist. Same thing different name. It has to be shown in person. I would not no how to describe it in this forum. If I get a chance I’ll do one and take a picture.

When you sey hitch do you mean a kellum type grip?I have personaly put 11000 pounds of pulling force on long 15kv pulls and have never seen a grip damage the cable.Of course we always wrap the end of the cables with friction tape before we put the grip on

 http://www.greenlee.textron.com/download/archive/118-124.pdf page 3…“Set Screw Clamp Pulling Grips” waste ~4 inches of cable, but that beats 2½ feet for a basket grip.

An old timer once taught me how to “weave” one-shot, on-the-job basket grips with several strands of 8-12AWG solid (bare copper) for a group of ±1/0-500kcmil cables. They worked great, and might be less damaging than the commercial variety.

Or, if you peel it off right after the pull, a couple of layers of high-grade duct tape under the Kellems might save some jacket scaring.




[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 05-17-2003).]

I got the impression from the post that the problem was in the damage they caused by half hitching the wire. Not the make up to the rope.

Thats correct Nick, it was a half hitch forgive me for not clarifying that,we had the pulling machine set back 20 feet and we needed just five more, we didn't protect the wires at all but the damage was so bad I dont think any tape would have helped,I will look into that monkeys fist though ,thanks for the help.