Either you have not registered on this site yet, or you are registered but have not logged in. In either case, you will not be able to use the full functionality of this site until you have registered, and then logged in after your registration has been approved.
Registration is FREE, so please register so you can participate instead of remaining a lurker....
Please note that the information requested during registration will be used to determine your legitimacy as a participant of this site. As such, any information you provide that is determined to be false, inaccurate, misleading, or highly suspicious will result in your registration being rejected. This is designed to try to discourage as much as possible those spammers and scammers that tend to plague sites of this nature, to the detriment of all the legitimate members trying to enjoy the features this site provides for them.
Of particular importance is the REQUIREMENT that you provide your REAL full name upon registering. Sorry, but this is not like other sites where anonymity is more the rule.
Also your TRUE location is important. If the location you enter in your profile field does not match the location of your registration IP address, then your registration will be rejected. As such, I strongly urge registrants to avoid using a VPN service to register, as they are often used by spammers and scammers, and as such will be blocked when discovered when auditing new registrations.
Sorry about all these hoops to jump through, but I am quite serious about blocking spammers and scammers at the gate on this site and am doing the very best that I can to that effect. Trust me, I would rather be doing more interesting things with my time, and wouldn't be making this effort if I didn't think it was worthwhile.
General BS forumI guess anything is fair game in here. Just watch the subject matter doesn't get carried away too much.
I don't know about anyone else, but using an extension ladder to climb up on a roof has always made me nervous. A while back I knew I was going to have to be climbing up on one or more of the building roofs we have here. One day I stumbled on a product that attaches to the top of the ladder and allows you to just walk on up the ladder onto the roof without having to swing about the top of the ladder for the first step onto the roof. Coming down made me even more nervous from the looks of the process, having to swing over onto the ladder while facing the edge of the roof backwards.
Anyway, yesterday I had to climb up onto the roof of the house to check out an area that was leaking onto our porch. We have had a few companies come out to look things over, and also two of them gave us estimates for a new roof. We have a metal roof, and honestly the quotes to replace it were quite shocking.
So I decided to go on up on the roof to look things over for myself. I knew I had rusting based on what I saw from some drone flyovers I have done, but couldn't get real close to the actual problem area because of those low hanging oak tree branches. I had been very reluctant to climb up there because I didn't know if the roof over the side porch would hold my weight until two of the guys who came out here for estimates were BOTH standing on that roof without an issue. The roof to the house is kind of steep, and I REALLY didn't want to stand on that if I could help it. The roof over the porch is nearly flat, which honestly contributed to the problem by allowing leaves to be held up there a lot longer than was healthy for the roof. But anyway, what I had hoped was just staining on the metal from the leaves from the live oak tree over hanging the porch, just was not the case. Rust, and quite a bit of it. I know I should have gotten the leaves off a whole lot more frequently than I did, and them laying up there and getting wet during the rainstorms really played a number on the metal. Some good sized holes and quite a lot of small holes too. And of course, the metal remaining is quite thin. So yeah, looks like a new roof in our future. No way around that. I temporarily patched up the roof as best I could with caulk and duct tape, so just a matter of hoping that works till we can get scheduled for the actual replacement.
Anyway, about the ladder extension thing. Worth it's weight in steamed blue crabs to me. Made getting on and off the roof very easy and worry free. Heck, I think I would even feel comfortable climbing up onto the actual house roof using that thing.
I got one of the smaller ladders as I think the highest I would ever have to get with it would be the peak of the garage roof, which is around 14 ft. off of the ground.
That extension I use has a rubber pad on the side of it that contacts the roof. And when using a ladder, first time up I always go up slowly trying to rock side from side to make sure it is stable.
If anyone is interested in that extension, I zoomed and cropped one of the pics I took so that the label is visible.
A while back I decided to take my Skydio 2 drone up over the house to do an inspection of the roof. I wanted to see how bad the roof really looked to see if I could get by with just having the area underneath of the live oak tree patched with those panels being replaced instead of the entire roof.
Well, no joy there. LOTS of rust on those metal panels, and it looks like quite a few of the screws holding those metal panels to the decking are rusted as well. Matter of fact, the holes punched through the metal panels look like they are rusted as well. Substantial rust all around the cupola, and I honestly can't think of any reason why it would be like that.
So anyway, here is the video I took. Or at least just 12 minutes of it.
I used the controller with the Skydio 2 drone. It was designed to be pretty much a "selfie" style drone to follow the operator, and as such has some pretty sophisticated obstacle avoidance programmed into it. Using it like a normal drone with the controller, I found that it seemed to fight me quite a bit, as it acted like it had it's own mind about where it wanted to go, regardless of what I tried to do with it. Not real bad, but not as smooth as I would have liked it trying to get the video I wanted. But on the other hand, it does take a lot of worry out of flying a drone when you know that it has a good bit of idiot proofing programmed in, in case you make a mistake with the controls and head it towards an impending crash with something. I guess if there were a way to make the protection zone a bit smaller it would be easier to control in situations like I put it in, but that does not appear to be an option. As it is, I can't get it to go through a stand of bamboo when the culms are 5 ft. or less apart. 3 ft. would be a LOT better. Perhaps there will be an update whereby that protective zone will be proportional to the speed of the drone. The slower it goes, the more time it has to react, so the protective zone could be a lot smaller. Not that anyone has asked my opinion for the design, of course.
Oh, the roofers are supposed to be out here on Monday, June 21. Coincidental with a tropical storm blowing in, of course.
Join
now to reply to this thread or open new ones
for your questions & comments! FaunaClassifieds.com
is the largest online community about Reptile
& Amphibians, Snakes, Lizards and number one
classifieds service with thousands of ads to look
for. Registration is open to everyone and FREE.
Click Here to Register!