Stonehenge for dummies

[Nielsio]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0

"Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity."

[thirddan]

thats pretty cool...

[Borodog]

Wow. That's frickin' amazing.

[hmkpoker]

Awesome video /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[madnak]

Eh. I could do it.

[FortunaMaximus]

And solve the riddle as to why there were less individual remains around the Pyramids than there should've been... All before lunch, right?

[NLSoldier]

wow very cool

[surftheiop]

that jack is genius

[Duke]

I'm pretty sure that the same Aliens who were responsible for the pyramids and the Stargate made Stonehenge too.

[theweatherman]

How will he place the horizontal stones across though? Jack it up the the correct height and slide it over? This seems to be a little more tricky without some sort of pully/mechanical system.

[Nielsio]

[ QUOTE ]
How will he place the horizontal stones across though? Jack it up the the correct height and slide it over? This seems to be a little more tricky without some sort of pully/mechanical system.

[/ QUOTE ]


Alien tractor-beam.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
How will he place the horizontal stones across though? Jack it up the the correct height and slide it over? This seems to be a little more tricky without some sort of pully/mechanical system.

[/ QUOTE ]

Far easier to jack it up on it's side and simply lay it down.

[kurto]

I'm a little confused about what he's doing with the blocks he's pivoting on little stones. If I understand correctly, he's getting a tiny stone under the center of this block and when he balances it he can pivot it on the stone... but how does he get the little rock underneath a 1 ton stone? And I would think it would still be a feat to get it centered so that he could balance the stone.

What am I missing here?

[Borodog]

You can easily jack the side of a stone up with a wedge and hammer, slide the little stone underneath it, and remove the wedge.

[Magic_Man]

In the scenes where he is simply spinning a block on a pebble, he has attached a wood handle to the block. He basically made a frame that slides down over the top of the block, with a long handle attached. He can get huge leverage this way, and tip the block up slightly on one edge while he slides a pebble underneath. Watch the spinning sequence again and you'll see the handle that he uses. At about 1:22 you can get a good view of it and see him tip the block up.

[CORed]

I've seen some TV programs where people tried to reconstruct how Stonehenge might have been built using methods available at the time of construction, but the methods they used were more labor intensive than what this guy did. Their mehod for standing up the stones was similar -- drop on end into a hole, but I think they used people pulling the top with ropes to get them the rest of the way to vertical. Most speculationI've on how they moved the rocks around involved using rollers or greasing the bottom and having lots of people push or pull them. The method of putting a small object under the rock and pivoting is interesting, but it seems to me that it does require a pretty hard surface to work. You couldn't use it on sand, mud, grass, etc.

[KUJustin]

How did he get the original boards under that huge stone to start rocking it back and forth?

[Borodog]

Wedge and sledgehammer. Easy as pie.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
The method of putting a small object under the rock and pivoting is interesting, but it seems to me that it does require a pretty hard surface to work. You couldn't use it on sand, mud, grass, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sure you could. You just have to use something large enough that it won't be pressed all the way into the ground by the rock's weight. Imagine a small stone pyramid with a rounded top instead of a point. You can make the base arbitrarily large enough so that it isn't pressed into the ground (unless the ground is mud, of course).