I like the mindset but... Wooden ladders are heavy as hell compared to alu ladders. Really not what I'd want to be schlepping across the place under pressure.
They also conduct heat, electricity and lose their structural integrity faster.
The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
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Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#212Americans seem to take a lot of pride in their fire brigades - their fire engines are still shiny and polished with more traditional signage and the fire fighters still wear helmets with their traditional shape. In the United Kingdom they wear more simple uniforms and the engines are just a box shape with no bells any more - seems a shame. Usually it's UK the has more ceremony in these kind of things.
Not really. Most firefighters in the US are volunteer, so not enough pride to pay people to do it. In big cities, it's more of an internal camaraderie thing. They live together, cook together, shop together, etc. A lot prefer being at the station with their 'brothers' to being at home.
Volunteer firemen in the US certainly do get paid, or at least reimbursed. They're not working for free. And places with volunteer fire departments aren't volunteer because there's no pride, they're volunteer because there aren't enough fires to warrant paying people full-time to sit around doing nothing. They're on-call, and they get paid to respond to fires. In the meantime, they go to their normal job that also pays them money.
Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the right money, you can find the right ladder. It's not going to be cheap though, because you have to age the wood. I wonder if there is a way to age the wood to SF humidity/climate faster than real time. Just feels like there has to be.
Pressure? But it’s going to be mighty expensive to build a pressure chamber that big.
Negative pressure might be more useful. Boil out the water under half an atmosphere, and replace the atmosphere with dried nitrogen and a chunk of desiccant.
You'll probably damage the wood if you do that though. Now I want to try it in my vacuum chamber, but I'm not sure it'll hold vacuum for weeks/months at a time.
Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#214I'd really like to learn some woodworking and make some stuff some day. I recently found myself admiring the grain on the wooden train track my kids were playing with...
I started with this book, which is a furniture book that uses a technique involving cutting slots in plywood. It's good practices measuring, cutting, sanding, and finishing.
https://www.amazon.com/Fast-Furniture-Forgotten-Building-Bea...
Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#215If you get a chance to visit a Smokejumper base, I highly recommend it. One of the things you learn is that everyone on the team is required to make all of their own equipment by hand. So all of these highly trained, ex-military guys spend days on end doing nothing but sewing clothes and packing parachutes. The reasons described: - Cheaper than contracting out everything - They have a better idea of the exact specifi…
For what it's worth, every rated parachutist packs their own parachute. For the reserve chute, it's always packed or repacked by an FAA certified rigger, which is an incredibly high bar by comparison. They must be repacked every 6 months.
The estimate is that on average a parachute will fail one in a thousand times, mostly due to packing error, seldom due to equipment failure. Maybe 90/10 ratio.
For a reserve, the expectation is that they would fail less than one in 10,000 times they are deployed. Which means that, collectively, avoidable errors should only happen one in every million or so rides on a parachute. This is less often than the real observed rate (1 per 75k or so), but errors other than packing or equipment failure are often the root cause.
Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#216The Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs"[0] show made a segment involving the SFFD's ladder construction/maintenance crew. In it, they explained that wooden ladders are cheaper to maintain than aluminum ones and I think also discount fiberglass ladders as well. It's worth a watch if one is interested in this topic. 0 - http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/dirty-jobs/about-this-show...
LOL at SFFD giving any shits about costs. This is the same department that power grabbed emergency medical response away from dedicated paramedics in ambulances. Responding in full ladder trucks to take care of drunk homeless people...yeah, they do that, costing millions every year in added expenses and road repairs. But good for them for saving a few bucks on ladders, that must make a huge difference.
Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
First thing that came to my mind too! I've had two "Please call me, it's broke" calls just this morning!
Why does your manager know this before you do though?
You're assuming 1) there's a legitimate technical problem and 2) the person calling is management and not a user
Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a common phenomena, and I'm not sure if there's a general term for it. E.g. people prematurely stop taking antibiotics because they feel better, or people go off their meds because they feel fine, etc.
I'd say this is best described by the concepts from control theory. In this case it really reminds me of bang-bang control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control and in particular, the failure state that it can result in when applied in the real world: "depending on the width of the hysteresis gap and inertia in the process, there will be an oscillating error signal around the desired set point valu…
We should use a PID controller to set the number of cops. Where number of cops is the control variable, and crime rate is the process variable ;)
Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#219The Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs"[0] show made a segment involving the SFFD's ladder construction/maintenance crew. In it, they explained that wooden ladders are cheaper to maintain than aluminum ones and I think also discount fiberglass ladders as well. It's worth a watch if one is interested in this topic. 0 - http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/dirty-jobs/about-this-show...
LOL at SFFD giving any shits about costs. This is the same department that power grabbed emergency medical response away from dedicated paramedics in ambulances. Responding in full ladder trucks to take care of drunk homeless people...yeah, they do that, costing millions every year in added expenses and road repairs. But good for them for saving a few bucks on ladders, that must make a huge difference.
Coming from NYC, it is somewhat surprising to see such anger directed at fire departments. Here, the FDNY seems universally loved.
Re: The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand
#220If you get a chance to visit a Smokejumper base, I highly recommend it. One of the things you learn is that everyone on the team is required to make all of their own equipment by hand. So all of these highly trained, ex-military guys spend days on end doing nothing but sewing clothes and packing parachutes. The reasons described: - Cheaper than contracting out everything - They have a better idea of the exact specifi…
For what it's worth, every rated parachutist packs their own parachute. For the reserve chute, it's always packed or repacked by an FAA certified rigger, which is an incredibly high bar by comparison. They must be repacked every 6 months. The estimate is that on average a parachute will fail one in a thousand times, mostly due to packing error, seldom due to equipment failure. Maybe 90/10 ratio. For a reserve, the ex…
According to Wikipedia, it varies. Some organizations don't require the jumper to pack their own parachute. What does seem to be a common principle is that "All riggers are jumpers and can be asked at any time to jump with a parachute they have packed." or in the US military, that any rigger has packed, without knowing who.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_rigger