Lashing A Tripod
The goal of the Tripod event is to wind up with a Tripod that looks something like this:
You start with 3 long poles, 3 short poles, 6 medium length ropes, and one really long rope. You start out laying the poles like this:
Note how the 3 long poles overlap each other at the top by around about two feet or so. And then for the three short poles, notice how 2 of them stick out one way, and the 3rd pole sticks out the other way. In this picture the short poles don’t have much length sticking out to the left of the long pole, so they should get moved a little bit to the left. That leaves more room to secure the lashing to it.
After that you being lashing your short poles to the long ones. Notice how in this photo Dave has moved this short pole so that more is sticking out to the right? He will have plenty of space to lash it toghether. Dave starts with his square lashing with a clove hitch on the long pole. Note that you start with a clove hitch on one pole, do the lashing, and then finish with a clove hitch on the other pole.
While he is doing that, other Scouts start on the center lashing, or Shear Lashing. Since this is a timed event, you should have Scouts working on all parts of this at the same time. Note that for the center lashing, you do 5 to 7 wraps, (around all three poles), and the 2 fraps, (around the ropes between the poles). You do not want the wraps and fraps very tight, otherwise when you stand the tripod up you can snap off the poles.
Here you can see Scouts have tied the initial Clove Hitch on the long pole, and are now starting to do the “wraps”, so named because you wrap the rope around the two poles to hold them together. It’s important to pull the rope as tight as you can for the square lashings, (NOT the center lashing), and using your foot as a brace helps. You do 3 wraps, and then 2 “fraps”.
Fraps are where you wrap the rope around the outside of the rope itself, not around the poles. You can see the two fraps here:
After you have the center lashing done, and the 3 small poles lashed to the long ones, it’s time to stand the tripod up and begin securing the last three lashings. Once again you start with a lashing with a clove hitch on one pole, then after you are done with square lashing you finish with a clove hitch on the other pole.
Once all of your lashings are done, it should be able to hold the weight of any of the Scouts on it without falling down.
Note that the tripod is centered, as in not leaning to one side or the other. If it is leaning, you will lose a lot of points in the competition. A big cause for leaning is when one set of poles has more sticking off the side then the other. Since all poles should be almost the same length, make sure that you leave the same amount hanging off the ends on all of them.
When all of the Scouts have stepped back away from the Tripod tell the judge that you are done, and he will record your time at that point. He will then judge how well you tied your knots and lashings.