Those old wooden ones were absurdly heavy in shorter lengths.

Michigan Ladder says hemlock rails and hickory rungs, 300 lb rating...
16ft = 36 lbs ~ 20ft = 45 lbs ~ 24ft = 54 lbs ~ 28ft = 63 lbs
32ft = 72 lbs ~ 36ft = 81 lbs ~ 40ft = 90 lbs
 
Their single straight 300 lb ladders run about 2 lbs per ft.
8ft = 16 lbs, 14 ft = 29 lbs, and 20 ft = 43 lbs.
 
Alaco uses Douglas Fir and tapered truss side rails.
The monkey is unavailable so I'll have to post the charts for Alaco later.
Here we go... 
  

Last edited by xoxoxoBruce (11/15/2020 11:23 pm)

molds

I've seen this picture a number of times but it was always cropped down to the race car and his lost wheel. But now someone has taken the whole picture and colorized it to good effect. Gives it a whole different feel.

 

Guy's thinking: Hmmm, where have I seen that wheel before?
It looks like the right one is getting ready to go, too.

glatt wrote:

Ha!  I looked at the picture before reading your comment and thought to myself, "glatt, that right there is an uncropped version of that image you've seen so many times.  So cool."

I always thought the guy was on a race track, but he's on a winding country road.

It is a race, and he was leading up until this point, but yes it's a road race.
Back when the automobile was a rich mans toy they raced on public roads until too many people got hurt. It's one thing to squash peasant spectators but when the cars got faster and rich guys were getting hurt they started building racetracks with trees safely removed from the perimeters.
 

The Osteotome,  the very first chain saw.
It was used to cut the pelvic bone for difficult deliveries before C-sections were invented...

It was an improvement over the hammer and chisel method,  but not as good as C-section, nor as good as anesthesia.

There seems to be some debate about that...
"The early history of cesarean section remains shrouded in myth and is of dubious accuracy. Even the origin of "cesarean" has apparently been distorted over time. It is commonly believed to be derived from the surgical birth of Julius Caesar, however this seems unlikely since his mother Aurelia is reputed to have lived to hear of her son's invasion of Britain. At that time the procedure was performed only when the mother was dead or dying, as an attempt to save the child for a state wishing to increase its population."

"Perhaps the first written record we have of a mother and baby surviving a cesarean section comes from Switzerland in 1500 when a sow gelder, Jacob Nufer, performed the operation on his wife. After several days in labor and help from thirteen midwives, the woman was unable to deliver her baby."

"14, 1794: First Successful Cesarean in U.S. 1794: Elizabeth Bennett delivers a daughter by cesarean section, becoming the first woman in the United States to give birth this way and survive. Her husband, Jesse, is the physician who performs the operation."

"In the latter half of the 19th century, the medical profession and particularly the field of surgery was dramatically improved by a series of technical innovations and scientific discoveries. More than anything else, the emergence of anesthetics revolutionized C-sections. Anesthesia did more than just spare the mother from the extreme pain, it effectively eliminated the risk of maternal death from shock which was one of the leading causes of C-section fatalities. Prior to anesthesia, when a baby was hopelessly stuck doctors would perform a very unpleasant procedure called a Craniotomy which literally involved crushing the baby's skull to get them out of the mother. With the availability of anesthesia the C-section quickly became a much preferable alternative to the Craniotomy. Even after the emergence of anesthetics, maternal mortality rates for C-sections remained very high in the early days because women routinely died from post-operative infections. This gradually began to change towards the end of the 19th century as germ theory and modern bacteriology developed."

There are two types of welding, one where you attach two pieces of metal to each other and this...


 

I bow to your superior research skills

A story of stretching your effort to reach a goal...

Remember, not all herculean efforts are successful, so choose your battles.