By Jim Pilgrim
The saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
I recently built a 24 x 48″ steel building and being as cheap as I am, I decided to build it myself with some help from my uncle. When we sat down to come up with a plan on how to get those 13 rafters up on the 10 foot side walls that we had built, we decided we would build “mobile scaffolding.” My uncle has a Gehl skid-steer loader that we could use to lift those rafters up from the middle, and we could nail them down to the side walls and not have to carry them up with ladders. Yes, we are getting older and we are getting smarter. We grabbed some scrap angle iron and some old sections of metal dock and welded up a 6 foot section. We bolted on a safety chain so it wouldn’t slide off the pallet forks on the Gehl and we were good to go. It worked like a champ! Lift the rafters, lift me up on the roof, and lift me up high on the sides to drill those screws into the steel siding. We now have a safe way to trim tree limbs on the farm as well — no more climbing ladders with a running chainsaw. It was time well spent designing and building that tool.
Six years ago, there was a need for the burgeoning fiber network builds going on in the country. A need for a tool that could be used in a variety of platforms (CO, OSP, Customer Premise). My boss came up with the idea for the main building block that fits in all our fiber termination products, the Clearview Cassette. A simple and flexible design that does everything it needs to do: protect, distribute, and allow access to fibers. Sometimes the stars align, when a solution meets a need at just the right time. We have used it ever since with great acceptance from our customers.
A couple of old farm boys came up with a design and built a tool. Our scaffolding was far from pretty or elegant — and it was a tetanus shot waiting to happen, but it served us well.
You will never get lock-jaw from one of our Clearview Cassettes, so I think I’m going to leave the designing up to my boss and the engineers at Clearfield. Believe me – our products are in good hands!
By: Jim Pilgrim