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2012/03/06, 10:25 AM
This used to be one of the most fun groups at Freetrainers. I'd love to see it come back. It's a great place for true stories, funny stories, trash talk and any other thing you want to write about. A friend sent me an email entitled "why women outlive men". It showed men doing crazy things on ladders, mostly painting" and reminded me of one of my ladder stories. Hopefully this will help jump start this group that was so much fun in the old FT. Tell a story , joke orr just drop in for a cyber beer.
I've done more of those than I should admit. When I was in my 20s, I was fearless on a ladder. Now, not so much...
True story: When I got out of the navy the only job I could get was in a rock quarry. I don't know if you ever noticed those conveyer belts on quarries that come from underground, go way up in the air and dump crushed stone on a pile. How the stone gets crushed is the interesting part of the story. Those giant trucks with ten foot tires are loaded by shovels and front end loaders in the quarry pit. They drive up the long winding hill and back up to a hole in the ground. There is a 4 foot thick "I" beam that they back up to and then they dump their load.
The hole into which they dump is a gyro crusher. It is a funnel shaped hole and in the middle is a bell shaped crusher that fills all but about 8 inches of the hole at the narrowest part. The bell moves in a violent elliptical pattern and as the stone falls in the hole, it is chomped into 8" maximum bits by the gyro-crusher and falls down below to the conveyor belt I mentioned. The bell and funnel are lined with zinc plates which wear down. When they wear to a point where the crushed stone becomes too big for the next step in the process the zincs have to be changed.
Each zinc plate is about 18x18" and 6 inches thick. I volunteered to help the quarry assistant superintendent change the zincs. The job paid $3.05 an hour. I figured I'd get a raise. The old sincs are un bolted from the bell and the funnel. You work from the top down into the hole. At the bottom, below the bell is a narrow cat walk. In order to place the last zinc, you must do it from below, standing on the cat walk. When the zincs are replaced, the opening is once again 8 inches and obviously you can't go back out the top.
As we stood on the cat walk looking down, I asked the superintendent how we got out. He said we just climb down. It was pitch black. I mean it was a black void looking down. He took my hand and led me to an opening with a rail on either side of an opening. He said follow me and we just climb down. I asked "how far"? He said "about 425 yards give or take. I knew then why nobody else volunteered.
Nowadays these long ladders have a round guard frame that slows or helps prevent a fall. In 1976, not so. We climbed for 40 minutes straight down the black hole and then walked the tunnel out to day light. I got a 5 cent raise. I got laid off a month later. I became self employed from that day to the present.
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