[TheForge] Mechanics of Stonehenge

[Bruce Freeman]

The one flaw I saw in this video was that he moves monoliths on a
cement surface by placing a couple pebbles under the monolith and
rotating first on one, then on the other to get net linear motion.  It
is not clear how he could apply this technique over soft earth, though
the demo of the barn moving might have been one such.  (Not clear how
that barn was constructed to enable to be moved like a monolith.)

I just went through my collection of "ancient engineering" books to
find a technique I've read about.  Unsuccessfully.  So I can't give
you a source, but I can give you another hypothesis, apparently based
upon relics from Egypt, IIRC.  Apparently, excavations found what
could be described as large (6'+) millstones that were not quite
millstones.  So the hypothesis was that these stones were placed one
over another and could then pivot fairly easily around a center shaft
because they touched only near the shaft.  It continued that two booms
projected away from the center shaft in such a manner that they'd
rotate with the upper stone (I don't recall details).  These two booms
were held at an angle above the stone (like, 60+ degrees to
horizontal) and connected at the top with a rope, from the center of
which rope a rope was dropped to the top stone.  Call this the "center
rope".  From the end of each boom, a rope was dropped.  One of these
held the load, the other the counterweight sling.

So you get a rope around your monolith and hook it up to one of the
boom ropes.  Now load small stones up in the counterweight sling until
you have an equal mass on both booms.  Pull down on (or hang a weight
from) the center rope and the load and counterweight both are lifted
from the ground a small amount.  At this point, using oxen hitched to
a beam extended radially from the 'millstones', rotate the upper stone
on the lower 180* and you've moved your load by the distance between
the tops of the two booms.  If you have a chain of these cranes in a
series, you can move loads continuously and the counterweights
oppositely.

Note that since the counterweights are smaller stones, they could, if
necessary, be loaded up on a sledge and moved back for reuse.

One neat thing was that you could take the two "millstones", stand
them on edges and put a beam between them and you've got wheels.
Place the other beams across them, hitch up the oxen, and you can move
your crane to the next work site.

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Mike Linn <bamablacksmith at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>  This is very interesting
>
>  For hundreds, maybe thousands of years, people have been trying to figure
>  out how primitive people could build huge structures such as Stonehenge
>  and the pyramids out of stone blocks weighing thousands of pounds.
>  Scientists have been stumped.
>
>  Then along comes a normal guy - a retired construction worker - and he
>  says well, I would do it like this. And he does. This guy uses the
>  simplest tools known to man and shows how simple and easy it would have
>  been to create Stonehenge.
>
>  This is a really great video clip.  Amazing how this guy could figure out
>  something that has confounded scholars for centuries.  And not only
>  figures it out, but demonstrates it!
>
>  This guy could build a replica of Stonehenge single-handedly, while a
>  committee of 20 or 30 Civil Engineering professors from leading
>  universities would be debating how it might be done.
>
>  ' Stonehenge Reloaded'.  You have got to see this....
>
>  http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/moving_big_rocks
>
>
> --
> Mike Linn
> Artisan Blacksmith
> McCalla, AL
>
> Start a revolution...
> www.fairtax.org
>
>
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-- 
Bruce
NJ

The total lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.