A Figure In Stone #5: Standing Up Pt 1

Dragging Out The Block And Standing It Up (Part 1)

I recorded some of the process of dragging a 1000-pound block out and squaring it off so it would stand up vertically.

It’s fun to impose your will on a half-ton of stone, but lifting or even sliding around heavy things is inherently dangerous. That’s no reason not to do it, but you must never let your guard down. Heavy objects can be very creative when it comes to #@%!ing you up. My life-long motto is, “If a job requires a 250 pound gorilla, you’re probably doing it wrong.” Don’t put yourself in situations where your physical strength is the only thing between you and getting squashed.

It’s all in the clip and I don’t want to bore anyone with a lot of obvious rules like not being under objects being lifted by a crane. Everybody knows all that, so if you do it anyway, well, maybe that’s just nature’s way of clearing out the gene pool.

But people don’t usually come to grief by ignoring giant flashing danger signs, so I will offer a general safety tip. IME, when bad things happen it’s not usually one massively stupid thing like standing directly a grand piano being lifted by a crane. More often, they happen when multiple slightly dumb things happened to align just right. Or sometimes it’s a freak chain of events: the guy was out of the way when the crane dropped the load, but unfortunately it landed on the end of the board he was standing on and flipped him into the cement mixer…

Today’s Classic Example

I’ve done this stuff for decades, yet you’ll see in the video where a machine does something unexpected and it combines with something minor that I did wrong that normally wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t a huge mistake–it didn’t even register on me that it was questionable when I did it.

The two things together cause the hoist to abruptly shoot forward about a foot or so when it shouldn’t have moved more than a couple of inches. It was harmless, but all it would have taken was a second mistake (like someone being in the path of the hoist) for it to have ended badly. You always want to stay multiple mistakes away from pain.

Even if you see it, you might not catch exactly what goes wrong. It’s a combination of two things. The first is mechanical. The hydraulic hoist I’m using has a little valve you turn that lets the oil out of the cylinder in order to bring the lift down. (That’s how they all work.) The trouble is, it’s sort of like the water valve in the shower where you turn it 89 degrees and still get zero hot water, then two more degrees gets you 100% hot water and the remaining 89 degrees of rotation do nothing. Even though I turned the valve a tiny amount, it let the oil out in a whoosh and set the stone down unexpectedly fast.

The abrupt set-down should have been harmless because the block was barely off the ground, but that’s where my mistake played in.

The very reason I was setting the stone back down was to adjust where it was hooked because it wasn’t level and I needed it level to safely set it down on the work surface. The mistake was that I should have immediately set it down and readjusted the hook as soon as it started to come off the ground at an angle, rather than waiting until I had it dragged out. “But I was only going to lift it an inch to drag it out.” Yes, but it actually wasn’t really an inch, was it? The low end was practically scraping the ground, but the high end was up more like a foot.

The thing that might not be obvious is that the distance from hook to hoist when the stone was horizontal was a couple of inches greater (at most) than the distance from hook to hoist when the stone was tipped up. I knew it might move the hoist that couple of inches when I set it down but when it came down fast, the weight of the stone imparted enough momentum jerk the hoist at least a foot. More actually, because hoist bumped into the block–if the arm had been all the way out, it might have moved it that much farther.

No harm done, but it’s a good lesson in how minor things can align to surprise you.