HE SLIDES THROUGH THE AIR WITH THE GREATEST OF EASE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 369, 19 July 1946, Page 9

HE SLIDES THROUGH THE AIR WITH THE GREATEST OF EASE

Daring Young Man at TVitahi Bay Transmitter

HE man you see in the tall photograph on this page is. Wally King, once a seaman, now a rigger employed by the National Broadcasting Service to do a job very few men would take on. He spends his working hours on the masts that hold up the NBS transmitting aerials, and the guy wires that hold up the masts. Over the last few weeks he has been sliding up and down the 18 steel cables that hold up the 700-foot mast of 2YA’s 60-kilowatt transmitter at Titahi Bay. It is exactly seven years this week since The Listener, in its second issue, gave an account of the work of Wally King’s predecessor, who was named simply as Joe, and said: "Joe has an interesting job ahead of him. In five or six years the guys will need painting with pitch. Not one of them can be taken down, for stresses must be absolutely even if the mast is to be kept balanced on its narrow base. So Joe plans to make himself a cage, rig it to the winch at the foot of the mast, and carry a rope up the mast and down the guys so that he can slide at will suspended thus in space." ’"Five or six years" became seven. And Wally King, who became an NBS rigger two years ago, has ,just finished the job when we took our photographer out to Titahi Bay to get the picture. we print here, Simply saying that the rigger has to slide up and down painting the guy makes the job sound frightening enough. But it is tougher eyen than that would make it sound. It has to be done at night, between the time when 2YA goes off the air at 11.15 p.m. and the time it comes on again before 6.0 am. "Sliding up and down" is not as simple as it sounds either. While King was in the chair, other riggers had to man the winch on one of the stagings inside the tower itself and act on King’s instructions, given over walkie-talkies. And to call it "painting" conceals the teal nature of the job too. It happens that the human hand is the only really satisfactory implement for working the paste (a commercial’ preparation) on to the stranded cable. King and his two workmates, who were also seamen before they took on this job, wear overalls that must now be a good deal more effective as windjackets than any treated material that was ever devised. They are thick with tar and paint, and may be presumed able to stand up by themselves when their owners are otherwise clad. The riggers have a wooden hut of their own near the transmitter building, and they are as easy to distinguish from the rest of the transmitter staff as the sheep are from the cows in the paddocks round about. They walk differently, talk differently, and look at you differently, from ordinary land-going humans. It is their fulltime job to attend to the masts and rigging of NBS transmitters. King recently inspected every member of the 2ZB masts on Mount Victoria overlooking Wellington, which have been up for 20 years now, and found that many of them will have to be replaced when the steel is available. The work on the guy wires at Titahi Bay was spread over some months, because it can only be done on a fairly calm night. The riggers had plenty of other work to be done around the tower, and the smaller tower that holds 2YC’s aerial out at an angle from the main tower, so they tackled the guy wires when the weather was favourable. The photograph shows how the chair is slung from the guy. The shield is made to slide over the big insulators, and a, strong steel frame holds a chair that was specially made for the job-and made comfortable, as some compensation for other discomforts. The winch cable was not attached when we took our photograph, but when it is in use it goes straight from the frame to a pulley at the top of the mast and then down to the winch on the staging. On the job, the riggers had the use of two walkie-talkie sets for keeping in touch. Without them, they would have been severely handicapped and slowed down. Watly King seems to like his job, as his predecessor did before him, and takes some pride in it. He even seemed to look forward to replacing the rusted members in the old 2YA masts on Mount Victoria. And when we asked him if he would rather work swinging from wires five or six hundred feet up than on small coastal boats, he answered, "Well, this job’s steady."