Redneck Engineering - Russian Style

Vaughn McMillan

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This is pretty brilliant...

http://youtu.be/c0_oKHARhXw

My personal Russian Redneck story...

A number of years ago, a contractor sent a couple of Russian guys to move a large, loaded equipment rack a few feet in the server room at my office. The server room was a secure area, so I was assigned to just escort and observe them. The equipment rack was bigger and heavier than a refrigerator, and I noticed the guys had no dolly or other wheeled gear to move it. As they were sizing things up and discussing their strategy while speaking Russian, I asked them how they planned to move the rack. The lead guy smiled at me and said in a very thick, Boris Badenov accent "Iss old Russian trick." He then pulled a couple of ropes out of his toolbox, threaded them under the rack, and the two guys hooked their arms in loops in the ropes and were able to easily lift it.
 
Such a deal! Get it before it thaws out. Good one Bob. :thumb:

Throughout the episode I wondered what would happen to the guys winding the windlass if the cable snap. I can see them airborne heading toward Siberia. :rofl:


One cold winter in the swamp I helped put together what was the largest land oil rig in the world at the time, one of five that size. This thing could handle 45,000 feet of drill stem and there were thirteen sheaves on the crown and moving block to raise and lower drill stem. We had threaded the heavy cable through all the sheaves and the block was secured down towards the platform with a brand new chain with one-half inch or bigger metal forming the links. Took several men to tote this chain! The rig was a triple jackknife and still laying down. The slack needed to be out of the cable just enough so it would stay on the sheaves as the rig was raised to vertical. The draw works were tightened up until the cable wraps barely cleared the ground then the driller running the crew ordered that someone go take the chain loose. 24 men looked at him like he had lost his mind! He said something very unflattering about our lack of courage and started towards the chain about 50-75 feet away. He was about halfway there when the chain snapped! Couldn't even see that monster chain as it whipped back and forth the first four or five times, just hear a nasty whistle as it went back and forth. That did solve the problem of getting the chain loose but the driller was a little pale and subdued the rest of the day!

I owned two wreckers with Tulsa winches on them as well as a few more equipped differently. Those PTO driven Tulsa's were vastly underrated as to what they could pull! My one-ton would snap 3/4" cable without ever seeming to be in a bind and my larger wrecker ate one inch cable like it was popcorn if someone made a mistake. I had heavy expanded metal headache racks and a small back glass on my bigger wrecker but at night when that cable got under a heavy load and the fire started running up and down the cable as the strands scraped against each other I would get as far in the corner of the cab as I could and watch what was happening with one nervous eye ready to try to move faster than the cable, futile hope! Never broke a cable myself but my drivers broke them a handful of times. Maybe they followed my safety warnings, maybe they were lucky but never anyone hurt. Invisible cable is a scary thing and it moves that fast when breaking under tens of thousands of pounds load.

Still miss my little wrecker with the Tulsa. It served a lot of uses besides a wrecker. A friend had some thirty feet tall willows by a pond he needed gone and asked if I had a chainsaw. I had a saw but the willows would just grow back if we cut them. I cut a couple of ten by twelve oak blocks to length to support under my boom on my wrecker and plucked the trees out of the ground!

Hu
 
An old friend of mine told me a story of an incident that he said he had witnessed during WW2.
It took place somewhere in the middle of Saskatchewan. The Canadian government had put up these very large Quonset type buildings to manufacture airplanes. In one of them they had a large square hole excavated that was lined with concrete. Its purpose was to hold some kind of machine used in the manufacturing process. Well one day the piece of equipment arrives only there is a problem, they can't get it in the building. The thing is too tall and heavy to lift with any of their moving equipment it being only an inch or two shorter than the opening at the end of the building. Well all these engineers spend the next few days trying to come up with a method to move the thing. Nothing works and any idea that looks like it would work, they don't have the equipment to try it with, being way out in the boonies in the middle of a Saskatchewan winter.
Mean while there is an old farmer present who has been hired as a janitor. Every time he pushes his broom past the group of brain stormers he mutters "I could do it". Eventually in frustration one of the experts says to him "Ok smart guy, what would you do?"
" Well" he says "I would open all the doors wide open. I'd shut down the heat then I would put heat wire in that hole. I'd fill that hole with water, flood the floor, let her freeze then push that thing in over the hole with my tractor. Then I'd close the building up, turn on the heat and pump out the water as it melted and watch that thing slowly sink into its berth."
Apparently that's what they did.
 
An old friend of mine told me a story of an incident that he said he had witnessed during WW2.
It took place somewhere in the middle of Saskatchewan. The Canadian government had put up these very large Quonset type buildings to manufacture airplanes. In one of them they had a large square hole excavated that was lined with concrete. Its purpose was to hold some kind of machine used in the manufacturing process. Well one day the piece of equipment arrives only there is a problem, they can't get it in the building. The thing is too tall and heavy to lift with any of their moving equipment it being only an inch or two shorter than the opening at the end of the building. Well all these engineers spend the next few days trying to come up with a method to move the thing. Nothing works and any idea that looks like it would work, they don't have the equipment to try it with, being way out in the boonies in the middle of a Saskatchewan winter.
Mean while there is an old farmer present who has been hired as a janitor. Every time he pushes his broom past the group of brain stormers he mutters "I could do it". Eventually in frustration one of the experts says to him "Ok smart guy, what would you do?"
" Well" he says "I would open all the doors wide open. I'd shut down the heat then I would put heat wire in that hole. I'd fill that hole with water, flood the floor, let her freeze then push that thing in over the hole with my tractor. Then I'd close the building up, turn on the heat and pump out the water as it melted and watch that thing slowly sink into its berth."
Apparently that's what they did.


Pretty much how they used to set down brick veneer houses that had been on a slab when they moved them. A bear to get them raised without damage after removing the brick then how the heck are they going to get it back to ground level on the new slab without more damage? A laborer on the job told them to go to the icehouse and get some three hundred pound blocks of ice to set it down on and then let the Louisiana sun do the work for them. Worked like a champ!

I had an old friend with about a third grade education. Could barely read or write. However when he told you how to do something you could get out a hammer and chisel and write it on a rock, it would work. Learning is good, sometimes experience and common sense can be better.

Hu
 
more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. did you mean something like these vaughn?

Yeppers, same concept. :thumb:

And all this talk of snapped 1" cables is nothin'. I broke a high E string on a guitar once. Man, those suckers can sting if they hit you in the forearm. :eek: :rofl:
 
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