Non-Flying Ladders

There's more to life than airplanes. Or should be. Horology comes to mind,
along with the grinding of glass into lenses and mirrors or the making and
repair of firearms. The latter arts are especially useful to those of us
having no love of slavery, especially our own. I thought it particularly
appropriate to be working toward that goal over the Fourth of July weekend,
drilling a tiny hole down the length of a stainless steel set-screw then
machining the screw to a precise length and putting a smoothly polished flare
on one end. The set-screw goes into the side of the barrel of .54 caliber
barrel where the central hole allows the fine grained powder in the pan to
ignite the charge behind the ball, sending it down-range with a mellow bellow
and a cotton-white cloud of ****y-smelling smoke.

Flinters, not percussion. (Caps is for sissies. :-) And folks who buy their
guns ready-made. If you're serious you make the whole damn thing yourself;
lock, stock & barrel. With a little help from your friends.

So there I was, making up some touch-hole liners for a fellow charcoal burner,
well paid with fifty pounds of pure lead because wheel-weights are too hard for
a good Minie ball. You can buy such things but they only come in certain sizes
and most don't have that nicely polished cone on the interior that seems to be
the secret for reliable ignition.

I made him up a dozen or so. They erode in use, need to be replaced every now
& then, along with re-knapping your flints. I used the little lathe, worked
sitting down, enjoying myself despite the latest bad news from the medics.

"You're welcome to any those old ladders I got," my friend informed me,
increasing my usual state of confusion. He usta have a grove of orange trees
before the politicians priced water out of reach. I know the ladders he means;
twelve-footers with three legs, a stack of them in one of the sheds behind his
place near Fallbrook. I've no idea why he wanted to give me one of his old
ladders. He makes a gesture toward the back of the shop; "I saw that thing you
got out there," he sez. "The one you made up. Regular ladder would be safer."
Totally confused, I get him to show me what he was talking about.

The ‘ladder' really isn't, although it's stored with a couple of other
ladders, under the eaves on the west side of the shop. It's twelve feet long
by two feet wide and hanging up there with other ladders it does look sorta
like something for picking fruit. "That's a welding table," I explained.

Ladder! Best laugh I've had in days.

The ‘ladder' has 2x4 side-rails and 1x4 rungs. Unlike a real ladder, this
thing is painted. Ladder, you can oil or stain but you never paint so as not
to obscure any cracks. In use, the ‘ladder' gets jigged flat across three or
four saw-horses and is used to hold steel tubing in alignment while it is
tack-welded. Once you've tacked the sides you use the ‘ladder' to jig the
sides square to each other so you can tack-weld the cross pieces and a couple
of diagonals. From that point on the structure - - such as a welded steel tube
fuselage - - is sturdy enough to hang on a pair of pivots, allowing you to do
the finish welding for the main clusters and start putting in the zillions of
little tabs and fittings that will make the structure useful as the fuselage of
an airplane.

To make the basic ‘ladder' useful you add additional rungs or braces - -
whatever is needed for that particular fuselage. If you do your tack-welds
with MIG there's no problem with charring the wooden structure of the
‘ladder.' Once the fuselage is far enough along so that it will support
itself, the extra rungs are removed, the paint-work is freshened up as needed
and the ‘ladder' gets put away until needed again. Which is more often than
you might think.

It's not just for airplanes. The ‘ladder' is in fact a general purpose
fixture, a kind of portable work bench. It doesn't weigh very much and is
easily brought to truth using shims and nails. Using lath or furring strips,
secured with a pneumatic tacker, it takes only a few minutes to install enough
triangulated legs & braces to impart the strength and rigidity of a battleship.
Its open structure is especially convenient when working with tubing or even
when making up re-bar structures for ferrocement columns and beams. It was
also used to weld of fence-rail into a tower for a ham radio antenna, to
fabricate a fuselage of riveted aluminum angle and to support the lamination of
some longerons that were sixteen feet long. Very handy thing, my ‘ladder.'
:-)

I thanked my friend for his offer of a fruit-picking ladder and sent him home
with a thimbleful of stainless steel touch-hole liners then spent some time
cleaning up the baby lathe before putting it to bed. While doing so it
occurred to me that a good deal of what I know will die with me. Which is kind
of sad. The ‘ladder' is a useful tool, allowing certain tasks to be done
with greater convenience than is possible with a solid two-by-twelve foot work
surface.

-R.S.Hoover