[TheForge] Re: guardrails and handrails

[Mike Spencer]

Andy quoth:

> the goal is to generate a bill.  And so it was true.  Without the
> bill, it is as you say, nothing more than a hobby.

[Rant-mode ON]

    This little squibb of mercenary pseudo-wisdom is a sour rendering
    in the mode of pop anecdote of the feeble-minded reductionism of
    MBA school, biz jargon nattering and religious economics.  You
    flossinaucinihilipilify the numerous -- possibly arbitrarily
    numerous -- dimensions of human intent and action into the single
    dimension of bottom line.  That is the risible tool of all those
    people in biz who can manage neither complexity nor ambiguity and
    who consequently can achieve self-esteem only by attaching it to
    the single variable of net cash.

    Your pejorative "nothing more than a hobby" follows the lead of
    the Religion of Economics in conflating all purpose, intent,
    desire and creation not associated with a mercenary exchange into
    putatively pointless frivolity and dismissing it as "friction" or
    as an irrelevancy in the single-valued purity of commerce.

    Bah.  Humbug.

[Rant-mode OFF]

There.  Now I feel better.

YADATROT [1]

I'm working on a simple 74"x24" balcony for a gambrel-roofed
barn/workshop.  It goes in front of what would be the hay door if the
upper level were a hay loft instead of a woodworking shop.  Just by
experiment, guesswork and general messing about, we came up with a
railing height of 42" to ensure that 6' tall people wouldn't/couldn't
pitch headlong over it in the event of the unlikely stumble or
misjudgement that it's being put there to handle.  A 36" height seemed
to put the rail way too far below the center of gravity of a tall
person.

It's mildly interesting in that the deck and front rail are to be made
light, to be lifted out, leaving just the firmly anchored side
rails.  This will allow heavy stuff to be raised by lifting on a
projecting beam above the upper-level door.

- Mike

[1] YADATROT -- Yet Another Desperate Attempt To Remain On Topic

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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