This looks... exciting.

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K8MHZ

K8MHZ

Senior Member
Location
Michigan. It's a beautiful peninsula, I've looked
Occupation
Electrician
LarryFine said:
Same message.
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Here is what happened to the video:

The footage of the climb came from a friend of mine that does this type of work, I have know him for several years and he has helped me many times in the past. Recently he gave me this video he shot on one of his jobs. I showed him the edited video and he approved it and I put it up on TheOnLineEngineer.Org and You Tube over the weekend. On Monday he was getting calls from colleagues telling him that they were concerned about what the video showed. His world is a very small one, and you don?t want to bite the hand that feeds you! Some facility owners are pretty uptight about liability and such and may not hire him if they think he does not take safety seriously.

So he asked me to take it down, and I did. That was Monday morning (Sep 13, 2010). Today (Sep 15) he told me it was up on You Tube, by the time I looked at it it had over 77,000 views. It was on more than a dozen websites. The chance that someone important would see it was increasing rapidly. So the video most of you saw was one that had been ripped off from my website before I took it down. I wrote asking the guy who put it up to take it down but got no response so I contacted You Tube.

Once again I am sorry about pulling the video, I know that every time I looked at it my legs got weak, there?s no way I could do that type of work. AND THATS MY POINT ? I need this guy who made the video, we plan to do more of them, but it won?t happen if he can?t get work because he?s been black listed by the industry. He?s also my friend and I don?t want to see him get hurt because of some video I put up on the internet.
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From:

http://www.theonlineengineer.org/TheOLEBLOG/
 
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hurk27

Senior Member
Location
Portage, Indiana NEC: 2008
iwire said:
Wayne I have to call. :grin:

Can you link to any personal lift that even approaches 300'.

(Cranes with baskets do not count. :))
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Don't remember the company who made the lift, or the place where they leased it from, but I remember it was a large flat bed truck with large out riggers similar to the one 480 posted but the cab was white/blue, and they used the boom to set counter weights saddled over the outriggers from the flat bed:
Tallestlift.jpg


I do remember the truck was a Mack, and it was leased by the School, they brought it out, and supplied an operator while we did the work, it was an articulating telescoping boom, which the first boom would go up to about 150' and the articulating part would outreach to 150'

The reason they wanted such a reach was to minimize the damage to the football and soccer field, they walked the truck down the middle of the soccer field, on sheets of 1.25" plywood 2 sheets thick,one set of lights on the football field was accessible from outside the field, they didn't want to be relocating the truck for every pole so they figured at 300' apart and 120' up, this lift would work, it was also all wheel drive, to prevent slippage from the wheels, it was a very wild ride, this boom would move, when he swung it left and right fully extended it felt like you were going 100 MPH, and when lowering back to the ground you would almost lift off the platform, I think my fear was showing, so he was showing off a little, but when we were going up with the fixtures it seemed very controllable, as he could feather it to the point it was barely moving.
 
LarryFine

LarryFine

Master Electrician Electric Contractor Richmond VA
Location
Henrico County, VA
Occupation
Electrical Contractor
dbuckley said:
Ok, the Video is back, here, and will probably stay there ...
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Thanx! Wow! I watched it full-screen, and close.

Every time he hit a transition point, I said "But, wait, there's more!?" OMG! I was agape the whole time.

Free climbing, no less. There are two guys who really trust hardware! Every bolt, every step, a break waiting to happen.

Then, here's the tricky part. Right. :roll:
 
D

dbuckley

Senior Member
Location
Canterbury, New Zealand
LarryFine said:
Every bolt, every step, a break waiting to happen.
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That's my core worry; the climber is always relying on everything he stands on and grabs to be structurally sound. If anything fails, then the chances are he's going to take a tumble. Now its true that a fall from 1700 feet is going to be no more lethal than one from a few tens of feet, one has a lot longer to think about one's impending death.

Also, where he does have his hook attached, it often has no method of making sure it stays attached. And if he does fall, the increased forces as the fall arrestor does it's job may cause the attachment to then fail.

All very ugly.

In the UK, where I learned about such stuff, fall protection has to be continuous so you can't come unstuck. I think your Department of labor rules are similar.
 
LEO2854

LEO2854

Esteemed Member
Location
Ma
LarryFine said:
That's just it, he was free-climbing. The only time he hooked on was when he took climbing breaks.
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Not only is it scary watching him free climing all the way up he's got to climb all the way back down and thats problaby even harder than climbing up.
Thanks for the vidieo:grin:
 
H

hurk27

Senior Member
Location
Portage, Indiana NEC: 2008
LarryFine said:
That's just it, he was free-climbing. The only time he hooked on was when he took climbing breaks.
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when he was inside the tower he had a back line anti-fall clevis which if you had your sound up you could hear it sliding as he ascended, I saw it in a couple frames, it's a vertical cable that runs up behind him across from the ladder when he was inside the tower, after he climbed outside the tower he was on his own, still not something I would do today, not in my shape:grin:

Used to design and build antennas with a few ham friends, I was working for a large aluminum extrusion plant in Sanford, Florida, so I had all the T-6 tubing I wanted, been up to 500' on one tower, it took some getting used to. (yea right):roll: But we got the job done, vertical polarized stacked 12 element 15/10 meter (dual dog bone) Yagi hoisted up a guy line threw a jib boom above me, not a job I would ever want to have to do ever again, my legs were jello by the time I got off the tower.
 
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