Something interesting about scaffolding

March 11, 2013 9:02 PM

Doing research for a lyric essay I'm writing. Without going into too much detail, I need to find out something, anything interesting having to do with scaffolding. I've read up on the basics (parts of it, materials it can be made of, its history, etc.) but have yet to uncover any really interesting facts or anecdotes. Anything at all would be helpful.
posted by mermaidcafe to grab bag (15 answers total)

Hong Kong Bamboo Scaffolders
posted by donovan at 9:19 PM on March 11 [1 favorite]

In China (& Hong Kong) and India, lashed bamboo is often used for scaffolding, even for really tall buildings. It's a lot more organic looking than the steel and board stuff I see around here. In Japan I saw construction sites where the scaffolding was entirely encased in thick plastic fabric, which looked almost solid.
posted by moonmilk at 9:20 PM on March 11 [1 favorite]

The guy who played Crocodile Dundee was a scaffolder before he became an actor. If I remember the story right his workmates talked him into auditioning and blokey history was made. Or something like that.
posted by fshgrl at 9:43 PM on March 11

Scaffolding is kind of awesome because, at least in the construction work I've done in the US, it like a giant erector set. If I'm remembering correctly, it is made of pinch pipes and planks and can be built all different lengths and heights per the job. I guess that is kind of obvious but it is a really amazingly useful thing when you see it go from being a pile of pieces to something you work on all day.
posted by fieldtrip at 10:02 PM on March 11

I have a mild phobia of scaffolding. I think it's going to collapse and crush me. I have talked to enough people about my weird scaffolding phobia to learn that it is more common than you might think.

I am quite happy that I don't have to write an essay about scaffolding.
posted by medusa at 10:08 PM on March 11

As reprinted in the collection Up in the Old Hotel, Robert Mitchell's "Mohawks in High Steel" talks about how Mohawks built NYC's skyline, starting with riveting up on the scaffolding of the earliest skyscrapers. It's very evocative. Here's a bit of it that directly discusses scaffolding:

In the erection of steel structures, whether bridge or building, there are three main divisions of workers — raising gangs, fitting­up gangs, and riveting gangs. The steel comes to a job already cut and built up into various kinds of columns and beams and girders; the columns are the perpendicular pieces and the beams and girders are the horizontal ones. Each piece has two or more groups of holes bored through it to receive bolts and rivets, and each piece has a code mark chalked or painted on it, indicating where it should go in the structure. Using a crane or a derrick, the men in the raising gang hoist the pieces up and set them in position and join them by running bolts through a few of the holes in them; these bolts are temporary. Then the men in the fitting‑up gang come along; they are divided into plumbers and bolters. The plumbers tighten up the pieces with guy wires and turnbuckles and make sure that they are in plumb. The bolters put in some more temporary bolts. Then the riveting gangs come along; one raising gang and one fitting‑up gang will keep several riveting gangs busy. There are four men in a riveting gang — a heater, a sticker‑in, a bucker‑up, and a riveter. The heater lays some wooden planks across a couple of beams, making a platform for the portable, coal‑burning forge in which he heats the rivets. The three other men hang a plank scaffold by ropes from the steel on which they are going to work. There are usually six two‑by‑ten planks in a scaffold, three on each side of the steel, affording just room enough to work; one false step and it's goodbye Charlie. The three men climb down with their tools and take their positions on the scaffold; most often the sticker — in and the bucker‑up stand on one side and the riveter stands or kneels on the other. The heater, on his platform, picks a red‑hot rivet off the coals in his forge with tongs and tosses it to the sticker‑in, who catches it in a metal can. At this stage, the rivet is shaped like a mushroom; it has a buttonhead and a stem. Meanwhile, the bucker‑up has unscrewed and pulled out one of the temporary bolts joining two pieces of steel, leaving the hole empty. The sticker‑in picks the rivet out of his can with tongs and sticks it in the hole and pushes it in until the buttonhead is flush with the steel on his side and the stem protrudes from the other side, the riveter's side. The sticker‑in steps out of the way. The bucker‑up fits a tool called a dolly bar over the buttonhead and holds it there, bracing the rivet. Then the riveter presses the cupped head of his pneumatic hammer against the protruding stem end of the rivet, which is still red‑hot and malleable, and turns on the power and forms a buttonhead on it. This operation is repeated until every hole that can be got at from the scaffold is riveted up.
Then the scaffold is moved. The heater's platform stays in one place until all the work within a rivet‑tossing radius of thirty to forty feet is completed. The men on the scaffold know each other's jobs and are interchangeable; the riveter's job is bone‑shaking and nerve­-racking, and every so often one of the others swaps with him for a while. In the days before pneumatic hammers, the riveter used two tools, a cupped die and an iron maul; he placed the die over the stem end of the red‑hot rivet and beat on it with the maul until he squashed the stem end into a buttonhead.

If you're a New Yorker subscriber or can swing a login, here's the link to the archive folio.

A little commentary from a random blog post (via google):


...But thing which is exited me the most, is construction process of this giants in early twenties and people who worked at heights, so called iron workers. Very few of us know that many of the icons of New York cities were build by theirs ancient inhabitants: the Mohawk. For more than century Mohawk iron workers have had reputation for embracing dangerous jobs of building bridges and skyscrapers.

“A lot of people think Mohawks aren’t afraid of heights; that’s not true. We have as much fear as the next guy. The difference is that we deal with it better. We also have the experience of the old timers to follow and the responsibility to lead the younger guys. There’s pride in ‘walking iron.’” —Kyle Karonhiaktatie Beauvais (Mohawk, Kahnawake).

A 21st-century Mohawk ironworker might easily be called a real “man of steel.” For more than 100 years, Mohawk people have taken part in the seemingly superhuman task of building skyscrapers and bridges throughout the United States, Canada, and abroad. Working in New York City since the 1920s, these brave and skilled ironworkers built the city’s most prominent landmarks, including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the George Washington Bridge, and the World Trade Center.

The Mohawk tradition of ironworking began in the mid-1880s when they were hired as unskilled laborers to build a bridge over the St. Lawrence River onto Mohawk land. They quickly earned a reputation for being top-notch workers on high steel, and “booming out” from their Native communities in search of the next big job became a fact of life.

During the 1940s and 1950s, many Mohawk ironworking families moved to the New York City area—as many as 700 families into Brooklyn—to aid in the city’s vertical expansion. In the 1960s, when New York City announced plans for the World Trade Center, Mohawk ironworkers eagerly accepted the challenge of erecting the then tallest buildings in the world. In September 2001, after the collapse of the twin towers, Mohawk ironworkers returned to dismantle what their elders had contributed to the Manhattan skyline decades earlier.

posted by snuffleupagus at 10:13 PM on March 11 [5 favorites]

Nothing specific to offer about scaffolding, but I would try searching for provocative phrases. "Scaffolding story" seem promising. "Funny scaffolding" perhaps. "Strange scaffolding"? You get it. Scaffolding scaffolding scaffolding. Funny word.

Well, I guess I can offer a couple of specifics, though they may be nothing like what you're after.

The word comes from the same origin as the French "catafalque", which is a lovely word, I think, and "échafaudage", which, well, maybe it's a matter of taste.

Shakespeare used the word "scaffold" twice. Once is in the opening chorus to Henry V, and it seems to be the modern usage. The other instance is spoken by Queen Elizabeth (nee. Woodville) near the end of Richard III, in different sense as a reference to the chopping block. She fears Richard's machinations will get her children executed (as, in fact, one of them was in real life).

(He also used the word "scaffoldage" once, in Troilus and Cressida. Ulysses uses it in describing how Achilles mocks Agamemnon by pompously pacing around pretending to be him, "like a strutting player [... who loves ...] To hear the wooden dialogue and sound / 'Twixt his stretch'd footing and the scaffoldage". This is one of only two references to the word "scaffoldage" in the OED. The other is metaphorical (and used by a philologist).)

One of the other 3191 words Shakespeare used exactly twice is "yesty"; once in Hamlet and once in Macbeth. No idea what it means, but this no longer has anything to do with scaffolds, so I'll wrap it up.
posted by fractalid at 11:06 PM on March 11

The band Bilge Pump do a song called Bastard Scaffolder. This may or may not delight you.
posted by ZipRibbons at 1:48 AM on March 12

The Bun Snatching race in Hong Kong had tall bamboo scaffolds from which climbers had to collect the buns.

There's the story about Michelangelo's custom-designed scaffolding for the Sistine Chapel - apparently he didn't actually have to lie on his back to paint the whole ceiling.

I've seen it said that erecting scaffolding is a favoured job for serious mountain climbers in between expeditions, but I can't track down the reference at the moment.
posted by Azara at 2:10 AM on March 12

but have yet to uncover any really interesting facts or anecdotes

Michelangelo, surely?

And of course there's the Washington Monument scaffolding, both during the restoration (of a unique design, not just the Michael Graves appearance aspects), but also going up right now for repairs to the cracks caused by the earthquake.

Similarly (and built by the same firm, UBS) was the scaffold for the Statue of Liberty centennial restoration. (The movie Remo Williams actually staged a fight scene on that scaffolding. And of course the movies, both on screen and behind the scenes, have a long history with regards to scaffolding.) There are also incidents where scaffolding has been implicated in damage to structures such as the fire at the St. Petersburg Cathedral in 2006.
posted by dhartung at 2:12 AM on March 12

This week's Economist has an article about biomedical scaffolding.
posted by rongorongo at 2:17 AM on March 12

When I was traveling around Europe as a student abroad in the mid 1980's, the running joke was "Did you see [any famous monument]?" "No, but I saw the scaffolding around it!!" It seemed like EVERYTHING was under renovation and covered with scaffolding. When I went to Germany last year, there was scaffolding on some famous buildings but they were covered with a canvas drape which was painted with an image of the building they were covering, so it appeased the tourists.
posted by CathyG at 6:41 AM on March 12

Regarding Shakespeare and executions – I always thought that usage of "the scaffold" referred to hanging (i.e. a gallows).
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:03 AM on March 12 [2 favorites]

Working from memory here: doesn't *The Scarlet Letter* open with Hester Prynne on display on a scaffold?

This is probably not relevant to your project, but what the heck.
posted by Philemon at 10:56 AM on March 12

Sometimes interesting facts about something include negatives. In 15th century Florence they were building a cathedral with a gigantic dome. Unfortunately, there was not enough timber in Tuscany to build such a large dome using traditional scaffolding to support it during construction. Then Filippo Brunelleschi came along and came up with a way to do it without scaffolding, one of the greatest feats in architectural engineering.
posted by TedW at 12:02 PM on March 12