Got tired of swinging the headache ball 18 inches off the deck, so I tried a trick from an old timer in Tulsa
A 30 year guy at a Tulsa job site told me to stop watching the ball and start watching the spotter's hand instead, and after 2 days of cussing I finally stopped bouncing loads off the concrete, so has anyone else built their whole routine around a spotter's hands?
Depending on somebody else's hand signals means you're stuck when that person walks off for a smoke break or calls in sick. The ball doesn't lie, it swings where physics says it swings, and learning to read that yourself is a skill that travels with you to every site. Building your whole routine around a spotter just means you never actually learned to run the crane.