Wednesday, September 03, 2008

More crane fun

Here is a list of some other things that a household bridge crane could bring within reach of the ordinary kook like me.

  • A visual artist could use it to paint canvases many meters across in the paint-drip style of Jackson Pollock, ones too wide to reach across normally without having to step onto them. You could either come up with some arrangement with paint pots and servo motors mounted on the hoist, or else a harness to lift the artist up to apply the paint by hand.
  • Along the same lines, the kids could put on a production of Peter Pan. Test those wires before flying too high, though.
  • It seems to that the main room cleaning chore remaining once you have a robotic vacuum cleaner is the need to shift the furniture both to spare the carpeting from getting those pits where the legs dig in and to give the robot a chance to hit those areas underneath. A judicious application of hoisting points on your sofa, coffee table, TV, etc., would allow you to whisk them away (perhaps just as the Roomba is heading in their direction) and to redo the room layout every single time a cleaning pass is done.
  • You could have one of the world's largest games of pick up sticks using a pile of aluminum trusses.
  • At the end of a dinner party, tie all the corners of the tablecloth to the hook and lift the mess out of the way in one dramatic gesture. Or if your gearing is up to it, tie only the corners at one end of the cloth and execute the classic tablecloth trick.


Really, it's surprising that more people aren't already clamoring for the personal bridge crane already.

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