Here they're called workplace health and safety and they can be a royal pain in the buttRasper wrote:Your head can move a lot more than your back can. Back when I ran an old country shipyard on the Chesapeake Bay I used to move and lift some heavy stuff. I have always weighed 130 pounds soaking wet, so there is not much muscle available for lifting. One of my best tools for moving huge oak timbers was a pair of cast iron wheels, probably from an old horse drawn mowing machine. They were about four feet tall. I had a solid bar one inch axle between them maybe four feet long, and over that a piece of two inch iron pipe riding in heavy grease.
And a simple crane. This one is so simple and obvious it's an absolute miracle no one uses them any more. A small straight Oak tree, or any kind of pole, with three rope guys, one behind and one to each side. Suspend a chain from the top of the pole with some kind of chain-fall or come-a-long and you can lift the heaviest things imaginable. All of the force on the pole is pure compression—no bending forces at all. Most of the weight is transferred to compression on the pole, and most of the remainder is taken by the back guy. Other shipyards spent ten or twenty thousand dollars for a used crane; I spent maybe twenty dollars for rope and another twenty for a come-a-long. I was in the deep country so Oak trees were there for the asking. In this case I used my head instead of my pocketbook.
Of course all of this was back in the 1960's and 70's. Now if you tried to use such low tech machines OSHA would no doubt have you in prison because they aren't government certified. (for the Ozzies—in the USA, OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—as close to the tyranny and nonsense in George Orwell's book 1984 as you can come.)
Richard
