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The steeple-jack's instructor

Chapter 16: THE BLACK WALL
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About This Book

A practical manual that teaches the trade of steeple-jacking, offering step-by-step methods for rigging, climbing, and repairing tall structures such as smokestacks, towers, standpipes, water tanks, church spires, flagstaffs, and poles. It explains how to enter the trade, emphasizes safety and professional conduct, and details rigging techniques both with and without gimblet wires, reguying, tripping, handling decayed or lined stacks, and installing ladders and self-supporting fittings. A substantial section catalogs knots, hitches, bends and their uses. Practical advice on pricing, workmanship, and time management rounds out the handbook as a tradesman’s guide to maintaining and inspecting lofty structures.

THE BLACK WALL

The Black Wall, known by many as the chair hitch, is used by the Steeple Jack while working in the chair up or down; stopping to rest or work, reach through the rope of your chair, grab the fall line by the right hand, pulling it through between yourself and the rope of your chair. At the same movement turning the rope from left to right making a loop in this movement, reach up and set it on the hook of the block at the chair; while doing this reach with the left hand and hold your four lines tight together. This prevents you from going down while making the Black Wall or chair hitch, as it is commonly known.

Black Wall Knot