The old foreman told me to just 'feel the swing' instead of counting cable wraps

I ignored him for like 3 years until a job in Newark last fall where my load drifted 2 feet into a scaffold and I finally tried it his way and it actually saved me an hour of rework, anyone else get handed advice that sounds like nonsense at first but ends up being the real deal?

3 comments

3 Comments

ruby6597d ago

Wait, so you're telling me @angela_morgan, there are guys who actually DON'T just wing it with tarps and hope for the best? I thought that was just part of the job, like getting rained on and having terrible coffee.

angela_morgan7d ago

Did you ever try it with a load that's got some wind catch to it? I had this old timer tell me the same thing and I thought he was just being lazy until I was hoisting a bunch of tarps one day and the thing started dancing like crazy. Once I stopped counting and just watched the cable and felt the rhythm in my hands it all clicked, lol. It's funny how your brain can overthink something that your body already knows how to do.

alice9287d ago

Wind loads are a totally different beast. Tarps especially will fight you the whole way up if you try to brute force it. Muscle memory takes over once you stop overthinking the count. Your body just reads the tension and the sway way faster than your brain can calculate. Felt like a cheat code when I finally figured it out.