How To Use a GRCS

The Good Rigging Control System - lovingly called the GRCS - is a winching and lowering system that can quickly change the amount of effort put into a rigging job. In this video Nick Bonner will demonstrate how to set up the GRCS by yourself and how to use the system.

Hi, I'm Nick Bonner for tree stuff.com and today we're going to talk about one of my favorite tools of all time. The grcs or good rigging control system. The grcs is a winch that you mount on the tree. And it allows a single person to lift and lower loads of up to 3000 pounds. It's really impressive. And it's made of four main components. So here you have the tree mount, the tensioning bar, which is a simple trucker bar, the hearken to speed winch, and then the winch handle. Now, the grcs is certainly a heavy thing and when you go to set it up, I think that's gonna be one of the complaints is that it is harder to set up than a porter AP is and there's no doubt about that.

It's certainly more difficult when you're all alone, than if you have someone to help you but since I am here alone today, what I'll do is show you how I would set this up by myself. And I would take the end of my rigging line. Tie it onto the tree with any kind of cinching. Then kind of guesstimate where I think I need this to be I'll tie a clove hitch. And then when I go to lift this up, just hook it on one of the fairleads there, I'm able to get it hung off the ground, which is gonna make a big difference as I go to set it up. So generally, I'll get it somewhat tight on the tree before I install the winch. So I'm going to release the talk trucker strap. Bring this around and then take care to get the trucker strap. nice and flat. tighten this up by hand. Make sure that I'm happy with where the grcs is gonna sit and lock that in. Now from here I can take a couple Have poles with the trucker bar and make sure that I'm really happy with where it's gonna sit. We'll go ahead we'll get this red rope out of the way.

So I'm happy enough I can go ahead and get the winch on here. Now on the top of every winch, there's a marking that conveniently enough says top. You want to make sure that you put that in. So you'll slide it in the marking going up. Get it in there you say use my need to hold the book the winch up. That's gonna take a lot of the load off. Go ahead pin this bad boy up. There we go. We're almost set so, a little bit loose. So I'll go ahead give it one more crank. Put the bar behind the strap so that I don't lose it doesn't get caught anywhere.

When you go to install the rope onto the winch and get ready to do some polling, you're going to feed the rope through the to fairleads and then carefully following the directions on the bollard, you're going to wrap the bollard until it's completely full with your wraps, and that's going to leave you kind of naturally coming over this part right here which is called the feeder and is going to direct the rope into the self tailing portion of the winch. It's important to make sure that the rope is really well seated in there, and then it comes out and it lays across the peeler, which is the part that removes the moving tail of the rope out of the winch.

Once you have it in here, we'll go ahead and go Attach the winch handle, and then you're able to turn the winch and one person can easily start operating the grcs. This is going to be in the high gear, it's the high speed gear, you can see the rate that we're pulling. But if I max this out and it starts to get really tough, I can turn it around this way, turn it the other direction. And this is gonna be the low gear or the high lifting gear. And you see, the rope speed has decreased, right, so roughly the same pace on the crank. And it's considerably or 50% slower on this side. This is where you're able to do the 3000 pounds of lifting with a single person. So really amazing the way that it's able to hold the rope hold the tension on all the progress and allow a single person to operate it.

When it comes time to lower. You need to be really careful and you want to use these filters. leads. If there's tension pulling on this and you go and you take a wrap off like this, what can happen is, is the rope can whip around like this, and come spiraling off the front. And you can completely lose control of the load, which can be really dangerous and could certainly cause injury or even kill somebody or break a house or do all sorts of terrible things. So really want to avoid that and make sure that when you're applying or taking the wraps off, that you're using an exaggerated motion and keeping the rope right, so you want to take them off, you're going to come like this and make do an exaggerated motion keeping the rope totally perpendicular to the bollard and under tension. When you are ready to lower, put the rope through one of the pigtails because that's going to allow you to step off of the angle and then easily lower. I don't have anything on there, right But if I did, if I hadn't been winching something up, you're going to easily be able to lower like that he needs to take more friction off. Again, exaggerated motion, get the pigtails out of your way back into the pig tail, and you're gonna be able to pay that friction through much easier.

So grcs is a great device, it's heavy. It's certainly ungainly and it takes up a lot of space. But when you find yourself in the backyard, without the ability to lift something, and you have this versus not having it, the difference that it makes is really critical. And this can make a job or even save a job in its ability to help you establish essentially a backyard crane. So hope you guys found this video helpful. And I hope you stay safe out there. Thanks for watching.