Getting the Job Done

Workplace Health & Safety

Acknowledgements: Inspired by email from Bob N my brother in NZ THANKS!!  A reader in South Africa has sent us photographs of a truly radical piece of ladder application engineering.  Possibly one of the craziest Death Wish entries we have seen in sometime... The men are painting the church clock tower in the northern town of Mussina, (previously Messina) South Africa on the border with Zimbabwe. The first glimpse looks bad enough, the man is clearly on a long ladder at some height and trying to rub down and paint.

You might think that this is simply man on a long ladder doing a job that requires two hands? The ladder is though longer than you might think; the one the man is on is not resting on the ground...

....However the base of the ladder is not on the ground, it is supported by this cantilever and human counterweight. It is in fact balanced on a cantilever arm created out of planks with a human counterweight sitting on them while footing the ladder with a rope. If you thought that was crazy it doesn’t end there, back up a little and you see that it goes on.

Step back and you can see the contraption these two have devised; and on…

..Although not quite, the first ladder is even longer!  Definite Death Wish What ingenuity! The chances of this going wrong are about as high as they go. In fact we wonder which route up the ladder our man took? Did he climb the outward facing second stage? Or did he clamber over the human counterweight?  You could call it a Stairway to Heaven...

When its Bigger but Not Bigger

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