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Comment by drchewbacca | Hacker News Reader

This guy seems to be way ahead of MIT on this one. He moved a barn (which wasn't a specially 3D printed shape) 300 ft on his own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs

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I have a 2 ton cement block which we leave out in the fields with our goats, and they play on it. We had to move it once to change where some fences ran, and I had nobody to help. So I just jacked it up then knocked over the jack a few times, and it was moved.

I've since come to the conclusion that when you mix simple tools with a bit of brainpower, you can accomplish far more than people would ever believe.

This man is a legend. He should publish, damn. I wonder what knowledge only exists in the minds of people who just thought to solve their own problems.

Don't you see that youtube video, he did publish.

Right, I hear your point, but we have a interdisciplinary discovery problem. No one studying the history of the Moai saw it.

Once it goes viral ;-)

How did he build the shoring blocks?

How does he get the pebble underneath a large block initially?

How will get the horizontal stones across the top lifted and pivoted into place?

On his website (now only available via Internet Archive), he claims to have used the same Herodotus machine to raise and place the lintel as he did for raising the initial supports:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161107075626/http://www.thefor...

I imagine once he'd gotten the supports placed, he could just raise the lintel between them with the machine, perpendicular to its final resting position, then rotate it into place.

To get an initial fulcrum under a stone, it looks like he built a wrench-shaped wood frame, essentially attaching a long lever handle to the stone. One can be seen in the second picture on this page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161206062032/http://www.thefor...

Things like the very artistic cave paintings and rock sculptures are fascinating. Or monuments. People haven't really evolved that much during the last ten thousand years. It's just some hundreds of generations. We might have more accumulated knowledge and tools now, but people were just the same back then too.

I wish the website any clear information at all about how he moved the blocks (or the barn?!). Is he just lifting and then sliding them? Would appreciate more information if someone knows where to find it.

He explains how he does lateral movement at 1:21 in the video. He's lifting the block enough to get an off-center pivot under it. Once the block is on a pivot, he rotates it 180 degrees, then tilts it onto a new pivot and repeats. Because the pivots are off-center, each rotation moves the center of the block a little bit in the desired direction.

At 2:08, they show the counterweights and one of the pivots he used for moving the barn. (It's a "pole barn", so it has no concrete foundation. His webpage says they had to add about 50% of its weight again in reinforcement so that it would hold its shape when moved this way.)

Wally Wallington

Even when you know his name finding him isn't easy.

Incredible. Thanks for sharing

The ingenuity is indeed incredible especially since it relies on such simple principles. But I have to wonder how useful is that transportation technique when carrying the stones over dirt paths instead of a very solid, perfectly flat concrete one.

In the video they show him moving a large shed over a dirt path.

He used a pivot sitting on top of wooden shoring boards, I can imagine the process for any weight would be similar.

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