The Rhododendron plants outside our bedroom window help us to tell how cold it is … today for example, overnight was cold; I took this picture about 7:30am when it was maybe 15f (-9c):
You can see how the Rhododendron has “dipped” it’s leaves nearly vertical, presumably as an adaptation to allow any falling snow to drop off the leaves and prevent breaking branches!
This afternoon, 3pm, the temperature is close to 40f (4c), and the Rhododendron has responded:
Since the horrible I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis last year, bridges all over America are being inspected and repaired.
Work has been ongoing on the A. Piatt Andrew bridge for a while (apparently planned before the collapse), but recently closure of one lane in each direction over the bridge has begun affecting our journeys out of Gloucester!
It looks like the bridge might be being “de-prettified”, which they’ve done once already – they added tall mesh fencing to the sides, to discourage people jumping off; but now it looks like the granite kerbing might be being replaced with ugly jersey barriers 😦
When I was in California last month, I was working with CMEC on a couple of brand new prototype machines, which they are showing this week at the show World Of Concrete.
My colleague Josh spotted a news write-up this morning, so now that these machines are officially published, I can borrow a couple of the news pics to show you what I was doing!
The machine pictured here is CMEC’s “sigma level”, very much inspired by competitor Upright’s “speed level“, put on the market more than 10 years ago! The interesting thing is that when this machine was created, Upright was located at the CMEC facility in Selma, CA – and some of the people working at CMEC now, also worked on the Upright machine … I’m not saying it’s a clone, but there’s certainly a lot of similarities!
The big difference between the new CMEC and old Upright machines, of course, is that the new machine has our PG Trionic control system – so it’s bound to work much better 🙂
Background:
A typical scissor vehicle needs to be on relatively flat ground before it can lift (maybe less than 3 degree slope); otherwise it risks falling over! Some machines have outrigger legs which the operator can extend down, to lift the machine off the ground and level it – but outrigger leg length limits the maximum slope that the machine can be leveled on (maybe 7 degrees), and leveling is relatively slow.
The “sigma level” machine works differently, using hydraulic cylinders to push the platform arms left/right and up/down, so that the platform is level even while the chassis and wheels remain on the sloping ground – this gives a much faster leveling, and can work over a more severe slope (up to 15 degrees!)
Hopefully CMEC will be successful with this new machine, bringing PG Trionic some more business!
