London> Guest Blogger, Doug Moldover

I have just returned back to Wisconsin from a week long trip in London and my friends back at the work site were pretty enchanted with England... and it's jolly old scaffolding! To begin with I visited Greenwich and went to the royal observatory. You were right Larry, the scaffolding was worth the trip. It's the first time I have seen construction being done on an observatory and it made me wish we did more star gazing in Sheboygan.

Even better, if you go inside the museum you can see old photographs of a construction effort from the early 20th century. If only I had a time machine! I would go back and explain to them that 1/2 inch beams just aren't enough when working with a circular structure. You've got to go at least 3/4's of an inch! I'd tell them about the wonders of safety netting and quad fold magnesium joints.


Now this one was a bit of a shocker. I always thought London was a pretty safe town but apparently they need to install security systems on their scaffolding. I guess that's another reason why I am proud to be American. Here in the land of the free, a man need not to live in fear that another man will steal his scaffolding. The funny thing is that scaffolding is terrible. It looks like the work of a painter. Hey buddy, stick to painting walls and let the big boys handle the scaffolding.

Lastly we have some scaffolding on Westminster Bridge in London. (On the left of the shot you can see Big Ben.) Now if I hadn't seen this work I would have thought that the British building industry doesn't know their asses from their elbows but this piece of work was impressive. They aren't messing around. Those are steel girders! When working on bridges you've got to have a strong structure, as my now deceased friend Bob Jadinski so fatefully learned on the Ashby bridge. Why Bob, why!