blog post stuff inside

[brianmanahan]

that looks pretty cool! i love those all-glass buildings.

i wouldn't be able to do job that involves physical objects... my brain can only remember and process things that are totally abstract.

 

[skyking]

How do you brush your teeth?

 

[BoomerD]

How do you brush your teeth?

who says he does?

 

[Charmonium]

@skyking I don't know if you were joking about 'only professionals' but if not, I see your point. People don't really think that working with and around heavy equipment can be life threatening, but that's only because the people that do that sort of thing are pros. Either that, or they're dead . . . or missing some body parts. Personally, I'm rather fond of my body parts.

edit - and while it can often be hard to discern, I'm pretty sure that they love me too. It's nice that somebody does [sniffle, sniffle]. Feel free to send donations to help me cope with my existential angst.

 

[Captante]

That is sooo Park Service to have you dance around a piece of crap building because it’s been there awhile. It was cheap crap when it was built and cheap crap now.

But... but.... it's HISTORICAL cheap-crap!

 

[Captante]

@skyking People don't really think that working with and around heavy equipment can be life threatening

No doubt about it... you have to treat being in an area with heavy equipment in use around you just like you do when riding a motorcycle in traffic on public highways.

In other words you're invisible and EVERYTHING wants to kill you!

 

[BoomerD]

It's been almost 20 years since I worked...but these pics were taken on my last job...Richmond/San Rafael bridge, SF bay:

When we first started, none of that structure existed. I had to hold piledrivers in a manbasket so they could drill holes through the concrete piers, then with them in small dingys, I had to fly the steel brackets and through bolts down so they could put them in place. Tides and waves often made that a challenge.
Then' I had to hoist the large H-beams into place on the brackets, then the fun began...building the basics of the platform. (carpenter crew came in and did the decking after we left.

Then, once those were done, my barge and I were off to work with the ironworkers:

My "office":

My daily "commuter vehicle":

(not a terrible view, eh?)

 

[skyking]

I've been on a job with killed people and severely injured people it sucks.

 

[IronWing]

No doubt about it... you have to treat being in an area with heavy equipment in use around you just like you do when riding a motorcycle in traffic on public highways.

In other words you're invisible and EVERYTHING wants to kill you!

I was working as a pinheaded regulator on an Air Force soil remediation project and arrived on site to find a total cluster of people and heavy equipment mixed in together with no recognizable order. There were folks working in an unprotected ditch with a backhoe expanding the ditch they were in. Since I had no authority to tell anyone how to do their jobs, I called the Air Force project manager and described what I was seeing. He drove to the site, shut it down, and had a come to Jesus meeting with the prime and all the subs. Things looked a whole lot better real quick. The prime switched out their project manager a couple weeks later, bringing in an old school, no-bullshit, experienced engineer. The difference was night and day.

 

[brianmanahan]

How do you brush your teeth?

ugh i forgot to do that this morning!

if i move something i can't remember where i'm supposed to return it, or where i'm supposed to put it.

and if i take something apart that's more than 4 or 5 pieces, i can't remember for the life of me how to reassemble it unless i took pictures.

my brain's as bad as my grandpa when he was 80!

and yet somehow i can remember just every detail and every change i've made to a software product that has almost a couple million lines of code

 

[Captante]

 

[Charmonium]

I was working as a pinheaded regulator on an Air Force soil remediation project and arrived on site to find a total cluster of people and heavy equipment mixed in together with no recognizable order. There were folks working in an unprotected ditch with a backhoe expanding the ditch they were in. Since I had no authority to tell anyone how to do their jobs, I called the Air Force project manager and described what I was seeing. He drove to the site, shut it down, and had a come to Jesus meeting with the prime and all the subs. Things looked a whole lot better real quick. The prime switched out their project manager a couple weeks later, bringing in an old school, no-bullshit, experienced engineer. The difference was night and day.

That reminds me of the folks that worked on the WTC looking for bodies or just DNA.

The powers that were claimed it was safe. Well, I don't know if that was a whopper of a lie or just good old fashion incompetence, but either way, even more lives were ended prematurely or simply ruined.

ugh i forgot to do that this morning!

if i move something i can't remember where i'm supposed to return it, or where i'm supposed to put it.

and if i take something apart that's more than 4 or 5 pieces, i can't remember for the life of me how to reassemble it unless i took pictures.

my brain's as bad as my grandpa when he was 80!

and yet somehow i can remember just every detail and every change i've made to a software product that has almost a couple million lines of code

I know what you mean. My brain damage makes my memory extremely selective. I suppose that's because it's sort of like an old Seagate 20 meg hdd trying to hold a couple terabytes. Failure ensues.

And the bitch of it is that it behaves like a separate entity with its own criteria and protocols as to which it does not deem me worthy.

But for somethings, it can be almost savant-like - like your ability to remember countless lines of code. As a result, people think I'm full of shit when I try to play the disability card. Fortunately, most of the time (after many decades of training) I can fake being normal. Yeah, he's a little weird, but brain damage? - GTFO

 

[Captante]

I know what you mean. My brain damage makes my memory extremely selective. I suppose that's because it's sort of like an old Seagate 20 meg hdd trying to hold a couple terabytes. Failure ensues.

And the bitch of it is that it behaves like a separate entity with its own criteria and protocols as to which it does not deem me worthy.

I have the exact same problem.... if only I could CHOOSE what to remember verbatim! (every weapon and armor in my Skyrim character's current inventory isn't especially useful IRL!)

 

[IronWing]

I've been on a job with killed people and severely injured people it sucks.

Yep, it sucks, no take backs, no do-overs.

 

[skyking]

Thanks Boomer, the waterworks are great stuff. @deadlyapp , thanks for the work pictures. That second one with the late model Grove tubular boom is nice. The early Groves had trapezoidal booms and are also cool.
The first dispatch I got after the surgery was running a boom truck on a grain dock for an emergency repair. The boom truck maxed out the structural capacity of the dock, and was bull rail to bull rail with the main outriggers.
We were taking down this piece of heavy machinery that got bent up against a grain ship hold.
We took off the telescoping tube and then they lowered it down with chain falls till I could get over it with the hook and rigging.

It was much heavier than they said it was. This is always the case with crane work.
I could not boom down enough to set it behind the truck. The solution? Take down the boom rest, set it on the deck, and back up till I could unload it to the side.

I backed up and set up the crane on outriggers again, and then loaded it onto this poor hapless 1 ton flatbed.
I backed him right up into my outrigger pocket to stay in capacity.

They repaired it and stripped about 1500 pounds of hardware that was no longer used. It was a bit easier to put back up.

 

[skyking]

working a job on the Seattle waterfront. Sunrise and you can make out the stadium roofs to the left, if you are into that sort of thing.

That outfit had a couple of whirly cranes from the Bremerton shipyards that they picked up surplus for pennies. The big cost was moving them. They built rail systems on one of their barges and rolled the crane on, then timed the tides and rolled it off, then turned it 90 degrees and set it on it's new rails. That is a ton of junk to move in one piece!

They are diesel electrics, and the one I am taking the picture from has a blown engine and is hooked up to shore power and does not move on the rails. The other one does track the rails and you have to go through a big startup procedure to get it going.
This is some of the draw works in the house.

500 HP Cat genset.

Each one has 3 drums, a whip line out at the tip, the main block in about 10 feet, and the 'old man' farther in. The old man is good for 140 tons.
Lots of electric control levers.

The job was scrapping out pulled pilings from dock demolition. The piling are soaked in creosote and get hauled off to a hazmat landfill.

 

[skyking]

The whirly cranes are AC, that big ex-Navy derrick with the bridge boom is DC electric. It had a pair of huge Waukesha gensets for main power, and a pair of 40KW Detroit two strokes for aux power. Hard hat on the genset for scale:

Startup was:
Open the sea chest valve. This was a saltwater valve that let the cooling water in, or scuttled the whole thing if something went wrong. The default position was closed
Start up the 40KW detroit and start building air pressure. The Waukesha had an air starter. Open the fuel rack, and start it up.
It spins right up to 720 RPM. That is it, it only turns 720.
Turn on all sorts of breakers and now the crane is live. You can either boom up or line up with this crane, but not at the same time. When you bring in one of the hoist controls, the engine goes from nok nok nok nok to NOCK NOCK NOCK NOCK and belches smoke out the stack.
It takes all that current to the house, and if you feather the control for fine work, it dumps the excess current into massive resistor banks that glow with the excess.

 

[brianmanahan]

dang that sounds complicated

 

[Charmonium]

@skyking - I've documentaries on this sort of stuff. Like the huge engines used in cruise ships. The pistons are equally huge. My guess is that they're well over a foot in diameter.

It's strange isn't it? You see stuff like on tv and it never really registers that this shit is real. That probably didn't make much sense.

 

[skyking]

I could go fire up the DC derrick like it was yesterday, but the diesel whirly crane, I would be scratching my head on getting the Cat generator fields working right. I'd have to get another lesson.

 

[IronWing]

I could go fire up the DC derrick like it was yesterday, but the diesel whirly crane, I would be scratching my head on getting the Cat generator fields working right. I'd have to get another lesson.

Allow me to whip out a picture of my guy derrick.

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[skyking]

the first derrick crane I crewed on was only 140 ton capacity, but a crane load chart is specific to the machine, and this thing has a really good chart.
It was built for the Department of the Army in 1945, as was the tugboat. The crane was originally modular but had been welded together a long time ago, and had been repowered a few times over the decades. As it sits it displaces roughly 2 million pounds, based on draft and area.

 

[skyking]

here is a demonstration of that good load chart. The load is a Bucyrus-Erie 30B crawler crane, with 70' of boom installed but the counterweight removed. It is a 60 ton rated crane.
We figured the weight as equipped was ~80,000 pounds or 40 tons, and the radius was ~65'.
We picked it off the dock and set it on a barge for a remote job.

 

[skyking]

By the time he had the load over the corner to set it, the derrick was listing about 2'.

A few minutes later we set a 15 metric ton excavator on the same barge with one of the whirlies.

 

[lxskllr]

So the tug and the crane are a 'unit'? *That* tug is always with the crane?