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Just some Philly Iron Workers Climbing High Login/Join 
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How the hell did the first guy climb up that beam?


 
Posts: 5545 | Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA | Registered: February 27, 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Picture of 45_Auto
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Talk about gigantic balls! No F'n way could I ever do that, nope!


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A Veteran is someone who wrote a blank check Made payable to 'The United States of America' for an amount of 'Up to and including their life'.
That is Honor. Unfortunately there are way too many people in this Country who no longer understand that.
 
Posts: 2306 | Location: New Hampshire | Registered: November 29, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
always with a hat or sunscreen
Picture of bald1
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Started to watch and then simply couldn't go on. I get extreme vertigo and this flick was churning my stomach from the get go. Frown



Certifiable member of the gun toting, septuagenarian, bucket list workin', crazed retiree, bald is beautiful club!
USN (RET), COTEP #192
 
Posts: 16690 | Location: Black Hills of South Dakota | Registered: June 20, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Shit don't
mean shit
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My knees start getting shaky climbing up my 22' extension ladder! NOPE!
 
Posts: 5932 | Location: 7400 feet in Conifer CO | Registered: November 14, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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For those who don't know they wire spool they are tied off to works off of inertia. You can move around slowly and the cable moves in and out freely but if you fall it locks up. They use the same thing at rock climbing centers if you don't have a partner to climb with.
 
Posts: 2489 | Location: Arkansas | Registered: July 21, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Lighten up and laugh
Picture of Ackks
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quote:
Originally posted by MikeinNC:
what are they tied off to?? looks like a small steel cable that is under a tension...kinda like a janitors keys?

That first guy climbed up and took his chain off the beam...then hung on with one arm while he wiped the bottom of his shoe. No thanks...
 
Posts: 7934 | Registered: September 29, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Never miss an opportunity
to be Batman!
Picture of jsbcody
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Nope. I was thinking, well I could be the crane operator....until I saw the ladder they climb up to the crane. Hell no. I think I could be a pilot before doing any of this high rise work.
 
Posts: 4176 | Location: St.Louis County MO | Registered: October 13, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Nosce te ipsum
Picture of Woodman
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I've driven past this site on Arch Street lots of times. Never heard any reports of dropped tools or bolts. Or deaths.

Ever work with concrete? The basement floor I yanked out of my home averaged 2" thick, and I put back nearly 4" across compacted gravel. The "basement floor" of the new Comcast building is TEN FEET thick. Fourteen million pounds of concrete. In addition, naturally, to columns down to bedrock.

a career highlight for Andrew Blasetti, 32, Angela Heinze, also 32, Lou Ross, 26, and Stephen Kane, 25 ... the four engineers Thornton Tomasetti, one of the world's leading structural firms ... assigned to the tower's construction.

http://www.philly.com/philly/h...ers_on_the_rise.html
 
Posts: 8759 | Registered: March 24, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Staring back
from the abyss
Picture of Gustofer
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Maybe with a wingsuit and a parachute.

Nope...not even then.


________________________________________________________
"Great danger lies in the notion that we can reason with evil." Doug Patton.
 
Posts: 21477 | Location: Montana | Registered: November 01, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Muzzle flash
aficionado
Picture of flashguy
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Back in the day, I think most such workers came from a particular tribe of Native Americans--Navajo?

flashguy




Texan by choice, not accident of birth
 
Posts: 27911 | Location: Dallas, TX | Registered: May 08, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Further news about the job - they do have some kind of fall arrestors. Can’t work without one now days. I think too the contractor has to put up catch netting as every two stories go up. The farthest you might fall, if the arrest or fails, is two stories into netting. In the past (my Dad retired around 2000) they didn’t have arrestors or nets.

As far as climbing the column, it involves toes against one inside flange of the steel I beam and fingers pulling against the opposite inside flange. Dad could climb one of those faster than I could climb a ladder the same height.

He was 6’ of muscle.

As far as dropping things, when you heard “HEADS UP!” you didn’t stand there looking at the sky, you ran for cover. Things did get dropped and everyone (that had any sense) wore a hard hat the whole time they were on the job.

I think most of Dads career was without arrestors and most jobs probably didn’t have nets.
 
Posts: 2178 | Location: south central Pennsylvania | Registered: November 05, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
No double standards
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I wonder how much those guys get paid?




"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it....While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it"
- Judge Learned Hand, May 1944
 
Posts: 30668 | Location: UT | Registered: November 11, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Muzzle flash
aficionado
Picture of flashguy
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quote:
Originally posted by Scoutmaster:
I wonder how much those guys get paid?
Not enough! You could not pay me enough to get me to do that.

flashguy




Texan by choice, not accident of birth
 
Posts: 27911 | Location: Dallas, TX | Registered: May 08, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Picture of cparktd
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Grandad did that back in the day in Chicago after he got out of the service. I still have the pocket watch that the owners of the boarding house he lived at gave him when he quit and moved back home.

He claimed that after the third floor or so you didn't really notice the increasing height... No tether in his day, and no bolts. Hot rivets, heated in a forge and tossed to the guys setting them.

One day he saw a man slip and fall to his death. They got the rest of the day off, next morning business as usual.


Big ol' Nope...



Endeavor to persevere.
 
Posts: 4321 | Location: Middle Tennessee | Registered: February 07, 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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quote:
Originally posted by flashguy:
Back in the day, I think most such workers came from a particular tribe of Native Americans--Navajo?

flashguy


I believe mostly from Native American Tribes in the North East.


*********
"Some people are alive today because it's against the law to kill them".
 
Posts: 8228 | Location: Arizona | Registered: August 17, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
7.62mm Crusader
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I did some fabrication, punching holes and slots and, a lot of priming and painting of structural steel. I could move the beams and plates about with a over head gantry throughout the shop, load them on flat beds. I would never go up in the air like that. Hell no! I saw a old black and white photo from the early years and a line of these guys were sitting way up and out there, on a beam, eating their lunch.
 
Posts: 18147 | Location: The Bluegrass State! | Registered: December 23, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
His Royal Hiney
Picture of Rey HRH
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They earn their pay as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad I'm not the only one who wouldn't be able to do that. Actually, I know I could do it; it'll just take me 30 minutes to move an inch along the beam. Maybe. Nah, I'll just freeze there in place.



"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, 1946.
 
Posts: 20805 | Location: The Free State of Arizona - Ditat Deus | Registered: March 24, 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
No double standards
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by Rey HRH:
They earn their pay as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad I'm not the only one who wouldn't be able to do that. Actually, I know I could do it; it'll just take me 30 minutes to move an inch along the beam. Maybe. Nah, I'll just freeze there in place.


Is that 30 minutes before or after you get dizzy/chuck your cookies? Wink

That is something I would like to say I have done, like climbing the face of Half Dome or El Cap. But I would never really do it.




"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it....While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it"
- Judge Learned Hand, May 1944
 
Posts: 30668 | Location: UT | Registered: November 11, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Posts: 2075 | Location: Central Texas | Registered: June 12, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
His Royal Hiney
Picture of Rey HRH
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by Scoutmaster:
quote:
Originally posted by Rey HRH:
They earn their pay as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad I'm not the only one who wouldn't be able to do that. Actually, I know I could do it; it'll just take me 30 minutes to move an inch along the beam. Maybe. Nah, I'll just freeze there in place.


Is that 30 minutes before or after you get dizzy/chuck your cookies? Wink

That is something I would like to say I have done, like climbing the face of Half Dome or El Cap. But I would never really do it.


Okay, I have to tell you this story. When I was a young apprentice in the shipyard, I got tasked with stringin electrical cable across the inside of a large hangar building. It involved climbing up and down a ladder. I got partnered with a guy just coming off "medical leave" for about a year. I have that in quotes if you know what I mean and what kind of person we're talking about.

I was supposed to do the work and he was just there to spot me. way before the half way point, he said, "Dang, let me do it." I was going so slow up and down the rickety ladder for him.



"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, 1946.
 
Posts: 20805 | Location: The Free State of Arizona - Ditat Deus | Registered: March 24, 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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