www.boingboing.net/2008/03/31/building-stonehenge.html
Retired construction worker Wally Wallington of Flint, Michigan is moving one-ton concrete blocks over a ton each by himself without using pulleys or any mechanical equipment.
March 31, 2008 3:53 AM "one-ton concrete blocks over a ton each" That's some fancy math! This is an awesome lesson in physics, and all sorts of self confidence "builders" as well. Regardless of if this is how Stonehenge was put up, this guy could bring the mountain to Mohammad (PBUH) if he had to.
March 31, 2008 4:32 AM SIRTIN beat me to my snark, so I guess I have to post a real comment. That's just a rumor started by the wizards to excuse their lack of artistic skills.
March 31, 2008 4:55 AM I have a great deal of respect for this guy, but what the video doesn't address is that fact that his method for transporting the stones woudn't have worked for Stonehenge, as far as I can see, as it relies on very hard ground. From Wales to Wiltshire is a few hundred miles of very soft earth!
March 31, 2008 6:10 AM A rural missouri man has also recently built a working stonehenge using nothing but ramps, levers and rollers. It is a 32ft circle with the largest stone weighing in at over 7 tons. Steve Wagoner is a retired miner and now raises goats on his farm.
March 31, 2008 6:13 AM I used the "two small rocks" method to move a washing machine a little while ago. To move the blocks over a longer distance, though, they might have used a technique that's been suggested for the building of the Pyramids... putting a series of round logs under the blocks, rolling the blocks forward, then moving the logs from the back to the front as the block rolls off of them.
March 31, 2008 7:04 AM That's a typical retired Midwesterner for you. What was really impressive to me was the shot of the barn being moved. It costs huge money to have a building jacked up on wheels and towed.
March 31, 2008 8:36 AM This isn't so much a demonstration of physics as engineering. Scientists are good at conceptualizing, analysing, calculating, and stuff like that. But I've never seen anything in the graduate curriculum in physics that touches on the practice of construction, much less construction using minimal tool, small crews and large balanced forces. Scientists are good at analysing what clever guys like this come up with, but not necessarily so good at coming up with it ourselves. With regard to the soft-ground problem: note that when he moved the barn it looked like he was using a wooden base about a metre square. A human with a mass of 50 kg and a foot size of 10 x 20 cm would have a ground pressure of about 12 kPa standing still. A 1 tonne block with a 1 m**2 base under it would have a ground pressure of about 10 kPa. In the early bits of the video when he's rolling blocks along wooden rails, he's using a technique of cutting ramped edges into the rails that match the size of the block so that is is always comes to rest balanced on a point. The cases he demonstrates are for blocks with square cross-sections, but using asymmetric profiles you can do the same thing with rectangular cross-sections, although there are practical limits that would probably prevent it from being used on relatively high aspect-ratio blocks like those in Stonehenge. Given the losses that are typical of construction projects, I wonder if anyone has surveyed low-lying areas along the presumptive route the Stonehenge blocks were transported along? All of these balancing techniques depend on carefully opposed forces, and as soon as one of the blocks gets away from you it'll go wherever it damn well pleases, often taking a few members of your crew with it. The odds of that happening a few times in the course of construction seem high, suggesting there might be a few orphan megaliths buried in swamps along the way.
March 31, 2008 8:45 AM orphan megaliths sounds fascinating. Although, in thousands of years of continuous habitation, I wonder if the locals wouldn't have quarried them up for other uses.
March 31, 2008 8:54 AM And to think how much time and effort has been spent on trying to figure this out. How could his methods be used in modern green building and construction? Sure there are limitations but you could work around them to be sure.
March 31, 2008 10:31 AM The problem with applying these methods to green construction is you've gotta be willing to ignore the time value of money. For individual builders who don't really care how long it takes to get things done, that is no big deal. Basic economics though, which is not going away, tells us that capital will be allocated where the return is highest, and getting the same result in a shorter time means higher return. You could argue, perhaps correctly, that if we did proper accounting of environmental costs the results wouldn't be "the same" in the two cases. Until we start doing that, however, either by carbon taxes&tariffs or cap(TM), techniques like this will be primarily restricted to hobbyists.
that should be cap & trade in my previous comment, not some mysterious trademarked system for capping carbon emissions. Apparently our bb overlords are aggressive about entity interpretation.
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