"Cables"

[TBrennan]

Some cables at work. No room for guesswork and cockamamie notions here, things need to do excatly what they're supposed to do, period.

[TBrennan]

My son Matt, a pretty good rigger, depending on a cable.

[radiob]

My palms started to sweat.

[ben.]

Are they directional?

[TBrennan]

Clarke---Nah, they ain't directional. But terminations are VERY important.

[ben.]

Screw it, just use lamp cord!

[Champagne taste beer budget]

Dems some serious cables!! But I bet they still aren't $4,000 for a 3 meter section. A month or so ago, one of my neighbors was up to his cabin, he works for a big "equipment moving" for lack of a better term, company, he borrowed a 120' boom truck to do some tree dropping in their yard. Had a platform suspended by it about 4x8 with 3 foot walls on three sides and a plank for a gate on the fourth side. A couple of the neighbors and myself went up to the top and took pictures of the lake, our houses, etc. It was way cool, but pretty spooky at the same time. Nice views from up there, but I think for day to day work, I'd rather keep my feet on the good old terra firma. Or cement floor, in my case. He was leaning way out over the edge with a chainsaw cutting off BIG limbs from trees 100' high like he was 2' off the ground using a pruning shears. I couldn't hardly watch just KNOWING he was going to take the big tumble, but he never did. Guess it all depends on what you're used to doing. I give your son credit for doing what he does, one of those things that everyone knows gets done, but not sure how it does. Takes a somewhat crazy person, I figure.

[sheltie dave]

Tom, my favorite lift ever was the reactor vessel head at Calloway, done with three mirrors(no direct sightline.) All of the cables, shackles, and boom were rated beyond scale, and had a safety margin minimum of 2.8. The lift(dropdown onto the reactor vessel) was done with a clearance of twenty feet on one side. Some of your buds have ice in their blood!

I really like working demo and construction sites where I see some grey heads once in a while. It is an industry where luck only takes you so far.

[TBrennan]

Dave---Oh yeah, I've done a few reactor head jobs myself. Boilermakers make the biggest lifts, everything in the trade is high, hot or heavy; often all three. Now I'm retired but my 2 sons are Boilermakers in Local 1. (One of my girls is a lawyer and the other has one more semester down at the U of Illinois; Classical Civ and Anthropology)

Having been a mechanical guy who needed to know exactly how something was going to act (or react) makes me skeptical of certain audiophile notions that aren't backed by a sensible story and reliable data. No room for such notions in heavy industrial construction like Boilermakin'; if things don't work people are goin' down. Not to mention TONS of money. I reckon I'm just a hard-nosed old son of a bi***.

[sheltie dave]

Most people don't realize just how much thinking(and quality) goes on in the trades. I had a discussion with my bro-in-law yesterday about the carpenter's union he just joined. He was yapping his mouth a little about how he was too smart for some of the sheet they had him doing, and I told him they were trying to figure out if he was smart enough to stick. Then I pointed out that he would be about $450,000 grand ahead of where he is now, if he had been working in the same union for the past thirteen years, rather than bouncing from pizza dude, security, non-union painter, and security. He also would have the equivalent of a construction engineer's degree. Some people don't get it.

See a lot of the same in electronics these days, with shoddy quality, parts, warranties, and service. It is getting to the point where you either pay the price for flagship brand quality, or go boutique on most everything outside of speakers. Even Klipsch has to hit the price points if they want to sell well.

[Ray Garrison]

'Tis good to be reminded occationally that our hobby is about the only quasi-scientific arena in which subjective, non-rigourously tested assumptions about "differences" between things like speaker wire are actually considered to be valid, by at least some of the participants.

I believe I hear differences between different wires. More often than not I'm disappointed by something that I expected to sound gooder that actually sounds badder. But I also know that I'm not evaluating any "differences" in a controlled, properly set up test. Maybe I could detect differences in a well orchestrated double blind test, maybe not. I don't know.

My younger brother is a member of the national guard. I have pictures of him sitting in a bosun's chair descending down and out from the Nation's Bank building in Tampa, across the green, over the river and into the park as part of a training excercise. 30 stories up, sitting in a chair suspended from a thin little cable. Doubt seriously there's much argument among his company whether cable "A" seems to be a bit "smoother" than cable "B".