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[pwdrive]

as you never know what a jigsaw blade is going to encounter and a hand-held circular isn't much good near walls

Yeah...Guilty as charged...been there done that.

The worst F up I did was at the Farnborough Air Show somewhere around 2000-2002, we were on the gang constructing the stand for EADS, it was a complicated stand, in one section there was a circular wall and up through it was all the stand comms cables, computer, phone, fibre optics, coax and electricals etc.
One of the contractors had forgot to run a couple of cables up, the only way in was through the floor near to the wall, I had a Festo circular, nice and accurate so managed to cut a 1ft square hole in the floor for access, lifting the cut out revealed one of the main timber support beams for that part of the stand, it was in the way, couldn't see to good peering down the hole, I figured to block up the beam either side of the section that needed to be removed then chop the section of said beam out with the chainsaw, got the support blocks in no problem, plunged the chainsaw into the beam, was doing ok then wierd and wonderfull things started happening with all the display monitors and various other stuff followed by a bit of a flash etc, you can guess the rest, severed the whole lot....Such is life.

If I can find a picture of the stand on the web I will post it up.

Lawrence.

Here you go, these pictures was taken at the Berlin Air Show c 2000

http://www.ktp-architekten.de/index.php?menu=2&submenu=davor&article=1&lang=en

This is the very same stand that was at Farnborough Air Show the following month, you can see a part circular wall in the middle, brings back memories, only part of the stand area is shown, it came from Germany in a convoy of about 40 artic loads, and as usual with the Germans down to the last screw cover cap, and bang on time, amazing organization.

The circular ceiling rings are actually polished MDF boards, lot's of them, we put them up and also the polished MDF floor amongst loads of other stuff. The Italians did all the glass work, they are masters at it, the site wasn't level at all, the whole stand (Except the central cast iron pillars) was built on 2.4m x 2.4m subframes made of 200mm x 150mm timbers, each corner had a built in leveling screw jack, they were all set level with a spining laser, that bit seemed to take forever.

The central cast iron support pillars were bolted to a very large lump of precast concrete weighing a fair few tons, the whole of that section of the stand was cantilevered out from those central pillars, all a bit of a balancing act.

Whilst there we had a sneak demo flight of the Typhoon Eurofighter, what a machine that is, rattling rib cages and all that.

Sadly one of the lads was killed on that job, we were sent back to the digs for a couple of days while an investigation was carried out. On our return the safety was red hot, we had to wear harnesses at anything over 6 ft in height.

Lawrence.