I do this sort of thing all the time at work. Archimedes lived over 1200 years ago. White-collar people really don't understand how things are done. I bet in China, construction workers still use these techniques as their primary means of moving heavy material since modern lifting equipment is still scarce and they have plenty of experience doing things the old-fashioned way.
Whenever I see some egg-head book-smart guy trying to do this kind of thing backaswardly, or reverse-engineer how the "ancients" did things like the pyramids or Stonehenge I have to laugh.
Hold my beer, watch this! Many people laugh at Rednecks -but we know how to do things...
Well, as an egg-head book-smart white-collar guy who doesn't really understand how things are done, I'm impressed when I see simple applied engineering put to such impressive use.
I've done a lot of moving of things just by a simple/easy rocking of them and jacking them with shims.
I once had a piece of electrical metering gear that weighed about 4,500lbs that had to be lifted up 6" onto a maintenance pad and then slid back about 4 feet to be centered on it. The guy who was running the job at the time told me he'd send me a crew of a half-dozen guys to help me jockey it up onto some rollers and then back onto the pad.
He came back 30 minutes later to tell me it would be around break time before he could loosen a few guys free to see that I had already moved it and was in the process of bolting it down to the concrete pad with steel drop-in anchors.
All I had was a 36" pry bar, a couple of boxes of steel electrical box covers, some 6" lengths of 3/4" heavywall rigid conduit, and a few 3/8" flat washers.
Cool! His "no tools" comment bugged me, though. A little stone as a pivot point is a primitive tool, but it's a tool all right. I had to edit it to "no modern tools" in my head.
Yeah. I'm impressed the guy can do all this himself in his backyard in his spare time, and gives demonstrations. Sure, he's not the only one, but not everyone takes the time to demonstrate principles and instruct n00bs on the way things are done old skool. >B)
Most likely, yes. "The use of ropes for hunting, pulling, fastening, attaching, carrying, lifting, and climbing dates back to prehistoric times and has always been essential to mankind's technological progress. It is likely that the earliest "ropes" were naturally occurring lengths of plant fiber, such as vines, followed soon by the first attempts at twisting and braiding these strands together to form the first proper ropes in the modern sense of the word. Fossilised fragments of "probably two-ply laid rope of about 7 mm diameter" were found in Lascaux cave, dating to approximately 17,000 BP." -- Wikipedia
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Whenever I see some egg-head book-smart guy trying to do this kind of thing backaswardly, or reverse-engineer how the "ancients" did things like the pyramids or Stonehenge I have to laugh.
Hold my beer, watch this! Many people laugh at Rednecks -but we know how to do things...
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I once had a piece of electrical metering gear that weighed about 4,500lbs that had to be lifted up 6" onto a maintenance pad and then slid back about 4 feet to be centered on it. The guy who was running the job at the time told me he'd send me a crew of a half-dozen guys to help me jockey it up onto some rollers and then back onto the pad.
He came back 30 minutes later to tell me it would be around break time before he could loosen a few guys free to see that I had already moved it and was in the process of bolting it down to the concrete pad with steel drop-in anchors.
All I had was a 36" pry bar, a couple of boxes of steel electrical box covers, some 6" lengths of 3/4" heavywall rigid conduit, and a few 3/8" flat washers.
Cake.
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His "no tools" comment bugged me, though. A little stone as a pivot point is a primitive tool, but it's a tool all right. I had to edit it to "no modern tools" in my head.
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Did they have rope when Stonehenge was created?
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-- Wikipedia
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