More on the Wall

The wall continues…

It seemed to take forever to frame the wall and there were many memorable moments during the process. A few of them; because of the positioning of the cables, we found that the higher we went, the harder it was to keep the Sky Climber from pressing hard against the wall. To move up or down, you had to reach out and push the climber away from the wall. And there were obstacles, such as pipe and conduit joints to push away from. I remember descending one day and suddenly noticing that my partner’s end of the climber was falling quicker than my end. “Hey! stop that…” I called out in a panic. But it was an illusion. My end was actually stopped because I had allowed it to be caught on a pipe joint and now I had about 5 feet of slack cable lying on the plank. I quickly reversed the motor before the plank slipped off of the joint. Or the time that I caught the control lever in my safety belt and when I turned, the climber motor turned on, dropping us a foot or so. Terrifying, when you’re 80 feet in the air!

Finally the wall was completely framed and I remember that we stood across the room from it and were awed by what we had done. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take a picture of it because of security restrictions. You may remember from a previous posting that I once worked for STL and all work on their sites was considered “Secret”. Too bad, it would have made a great picture!

Now it was time to put drywall on those studs and so we began, at the bottom of course, and each day we would climb higher up the wall. And since we couldn’t carry more than one sheet of drywall at a time on the Sky Climber, we had to use a rope and pulley to get the sheets up the wall. We used a C-clamp with large plates welded to it to hold the sheet and one, or more usually two people to pull on the rope. We did have one journeyman that could stand flat footed and pull a 4’ x 10’ sheet up, hand over hand, one hand at a time. He was awesome to watch!

And what was the purpose of the wall? We were told that the Shake Test Facility had two security classifications. One side of the wall was “Top Secret” while the other side was simply “Secret” and so a wall was needed…of course. And what did they do that was so secret? They would take a missile, the whole thing, into the room and shake it. I can only suppose that they then counted the things that fell off of it?