Asymmetric stepladder

Monday 22 August 2016

In front of our house there is a steep hillside that leads down to the fjord. Just after we built the house we planted fruit trees, the steepest orchard in the world. The steepness makes picking the fruit quite challenging especially on the downhill side. This year we have loads of plums and I didn´t want them to go to waste so thought of the asymmetric stepladder. I extended the front legs of a stepladder by duct taping extendable mop handles to them. I tried it out and it works quite well as long as the legs are placed well, I only fell off once. You may not think duct tape is strong enough but I intuitively knew that, provided the ladder was steep, the lower legs woudn´t have to bear much weight. I made an Algodoo simulation to see if my intuition was correct.

I had a look online to see if anyone sells such a thing but it seems not. Maybe difficult to market such a potentially dangerous contraption.

 


Tags: random, engineering