28 Years in the Making

Eccentrics building bizarre monuments is somewhat old hat, but Edward Leedskalnin took it a little farther than most.

The Coral Castle, located in Southern Florida, is a bizarre complex of limestone megaliths. Each stone weighs several tons.

Leedskalnin spent more than 28 years building the coral castle, and he allowed no one to watch him work. He claimed that the only tool he used was a “perpetual motion holder,” whatever that is.

His eccentricities don't stop there. He claimed that magnets cured him of tuberculosis. When asked how he built the castle, he would only answer, “It's not difficult if you know how.”

The “castle” itself is constructed of a thousand tons of oolitic limestone, which comes from coral. The joints of the stones use no mortar; all of the structures are held together by their weight alone. The whole thing is surrounded by a wall of eight-foot tall standing stones, which Hurricane Andrew didn’t even shift in 1992.

Leedskalnin himself lived in a two-story tower near the center of the maze. Other structures on the site include a sundial, fountains, obelisks, and countless pieces of stone furniture. The largest stone weighs 27 tons, and the largest monoliths top 25 feet.

Coral Castle’s most famous structure is the revolving gate: an eight-ton structure that a child could push open with a finger. The gate had to be removed for repairs in the 80s, when it was discovered that Leedskalnin had drilled a hole through the middle and put a metal shaft connected to a truck bearing through it. The repaired gate, unfortunately, doesn't open quite as easily.

Edward Leedskalnin once claimed that he had discovered the secrets of the pyramids. This actually might not be too far off. Archaeologists and engineers have come to find that the Egyptians used incredibly clever engineering techniques to accomplish their constructions with relatively small workforces.

All the stories about the eccentric using strange powers have been debunked. Though he was highly secretive, a few people did witness his construction techniques, which were as mundane—though clever—as they come. Still, though, it's pretty cool stuff.

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Quotable

Yes Yard Ramp Guy: Onward and backward with our quote-off. Xcellent, I say.

“X marks the spot.”

— Lots of people, including pirates, Indiana Jones, and me.

Ground Your Lift

Forklifts weigh massively more than cars do. They are not toys. If you play with one, you're going to get hurt or die. Not that those people apt to play with them in the first place are going to listen, but at least I tried.

In all seriousness, they're one of the leading cause of serious workplace injuries in warehouses. (The leading cause of minor injuries—er, hands down—are cardboard cuts.)

An early ancestor of the forklift was a manually powered hoist that we employed to lift a load. Simple in design and easy to manipulate, it generated lift through basic mechanical advantage. Those stuck around for a while without changing much.

In 1906, though, the Pennsylvania railroad introduced battery powered trucks to move luggage at stations. These two developments quickly began converging in the years leading up to the first world war, when a labor shortage—brought on by the war and the Spanish Flu—spurred the development of early hauling tractors and trucks.

We continued to develop these over the years, and the introduction of hydraulics set the pace for modern usefulness.

I'm Inclined to Inspect

The most important piece of the puzzle, though, is one that no one blinks twice at today: the standardized wooden pallet. Skids (essentially pallets with no boards on the bottom) had existed since Ancient Egypt.

Up until the 1930s, barrels and crates remained the preferred shipping options. Pallets, however, came together with forklifts in a perfect storm, and we rapidly standardized them, along with forklift sizes. Though there are many different pallet standards today, they largely remain homogenous in any given region.

We also standardized pallet jacks. (Interestingly enough, the pallet jack dates back to 1918, making the forklift actually older than the pallet jack.) The second world war only served to cement forklifts and pallets as preeminent in shipping.

This might all seem like idle trivia, but it's actually incredibly important. We design pretty much everything in that world—from truck widths and road widths to warehouse layouts and cardboard box sizes—with the different sizes of pallets in mind.

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Quotable

Cheers to you, Yard Ramp Guy. May 2017 bring greater reach to your business. In the meantime…

“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”

— Bill Vaughn

The one that didn't get away.

Fishing: It predates civilization…even the human race. (Birds fish, after all.)

There are plenty of ways people fish, ranging from fishing spears (which are really, really difficult to use) to nets. The best way, or at least most fun, is with a hook and a line. And it's a very old way.

The oldest fish hook in existence was carved out of shell. Fishing hook hunters (or stumble-uponers) found it in East Timor, and it dates back to as much as twenty-three THOUSAND years.

Shell was an extremely common material for ancient fish hooks. Our ancestors crafted hooks from bone, wood, horns, stone, bronze, and eventually iron. Each one of them, however, had problems of its own. Wood, for instance, floats, and that necessitates weights, or heavier bait. One common workaround was using multiple of these materials to leverage their strengths.

Fishing hooks became more common in the archaeological record around 7000 BC. Many of the early fishhooks lacked barbs, which would have made it much more difficult to fish with. In fact, one of the earliest types of fishing hook, known as a gorge hook, wasn't even curved.

The gorge hook is a small stick tapered to a point on each end. A small groove is cut around the middle, where a cord is tied. The cord is then wrapped along the length of the gorge hook, securing a piece of bait to it. When the fish grabs the bait, the cord comes unwound, which then results in the gorge hook turning sideways and lodging in the fish's throat.

This does require you to know the average length of fish in the area, though. The gorge hook has the distinction of being one of the few hooks that aren't prone to stabbing into your thumb.

Fishing with an antique-style hook is definitely a challenge. But the satisfaction you get makes it worthwhile.

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Quotable

Yes, Yard Ramp Guy: I believe I’ve got you this week—hook, line, and sinker:

“If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles.”

— Doug Larson

Laminated

Wooden buildings are making a comeback, and in a big way. Well, make that a sort-of wood. We create cross-laminated timber (CLT) by gluing layers of parallel beams atop one another perpendicularly, forming panels that are up to six inches thick.

The panels are as comparably strong as steel. Much of this strength comes from their ability to distribute loads across the entire panel, rather than the skeletal columns used in steel constructions.

It's essentially plywood on steroids. A lot of steroids.

This isn't just an experimental material. We developed CLT in the 1990s. We’ve already used it to build multiple nine- and ten-story buildings, and we have towers up to 34 stories in the works. (Old wooden buildings were lucky to reach five stories in height.)

Their internal architecture doesn't resemble old wooden buildings, though. The design is much more similar to concrete buildings.

And the process moves considerably faster than conventional steel and concrete construction—as much as 30 percent faster than comparable buildings, and 15 percent cheaper. Much of the savings in time come from the fact that panels are usually prefabbed, and just need to be screwed together.

Fire safety is one of the usual concerns regarding building with wood, but it's not one with CLT. Yes, the timber on the outside will char, but the inside will still remain structurally sound. Steel, on the other hand, melts all the way through when it gets hot enough.

Designers and builders are not leaving things to chance, though: they usually install gypsum paneling over the CLT to further shield it from fire.

CLT is also considerably more environmentally friendly. Wood is a carbon sink—which means it absorbs more carbon than it emits as carbon dioxide. So buildings that we construct from wood serve to offset carbon emissions to the point where the building is carbon negative.

Which means that treehouses and wooden skyscrapers are actually fighting global warming.

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Quotable

To The Yard Ramp Guy: Would you dare quote about wood this week?

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."

— Gabriel García Márquez

The Octobot

When someone talks about robots, the first thing you think of is metal. Metal limbs, gears, motors, etc. Maybe there’s a bit of plastic involved, but the basic nature of a robot is something solid, rigid, unyielding.

Even robots built to look human in fiction—androids—generally have rigid infrastructure underneath their fleshy bits. The thing is, though: none of those elements are actual requirements of robothood.

Enter the Octobot.

The Octobot is the first entirely soft-bodied robot in existence. This 3D-printed robot is constructed entirely without electronics or circuitry and instead relies on pneumatic logic gates. Tiny channels, grown into the material of the bot during printing, carry hydrogen peroxide throughout the body, passing through various gates and coming into contact with bits of platinum, which break down the hydrogen peroxide.

The released oxygen gas then expands and propels, moving the limbs. The current model can run for about eight minutes on a full tank.

Semi-autonomous behavior

Current designs can’t do much more than wiggle around, but future Octobot designs promise the ability to move around and interact with their environments more fully.

How are these soft-bodied robots going to be used, though? We need to look to the Octobot’s inspiration for that.

Like the octopus, soft-bodied robots would possess the ability to force themselves into much smaller spaces and conditions than a normal, rigid robot.

The lack of an absolute requirement for an electrical system or a chemical power source might also present an advantage in certain conditions, though I’m sure many—if not most—future soft robots will have electrical systems and computers.

Plus, soft robots would just be fun to play with.

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Quotable

Dear Yard Ramp Guy: Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots."

— Erich Fromm