I was going to research how manufactured homes are tied down, but realized before I typed the query into Google that I don’t have to think any more. Instead, I typed, How are manufactured homes anchored into Chat GPT, and this came out:
Manufactured homes are anchored to the ground using a variety of methods, depending on local building codes and the specific site conditions. Some common methods include:
- Anchoring to a concrete pad or slab: The home is placed on a concrete pad or slab that is anchored to the ground using concrete footings and steel reinforcement.
- Piers and blocks: The home is placed on concrete piers or blocks that are anchored to the ground using steel or concrete anchors.
- Tie-downs: The home is anchored to the ground using steel straps or cables that are anchored to the ground using steel or concrete anchors.
- Auger anchors: The home is anchored to the ground using auger anchors, which are screwed into the ground and attached to the home’s chassis.
It’s important to note that these anchoring methods may vary depending on the local building codes, zoning laws and the specific site conditions. Consult with the manufacturer, local building codes and professional engineer or architect to determine the best anchoring method for your manufactured home
(I had a few DM questions about yesterday’s post, asking if I had written the Mechanical Turk’s copy. The answer was, no. Anything ascribed to the Mechanical Turk was created by the Mechanical Turk and the Mechanical Turk alone. Same for the content above.)[1]
Old-school mobile home tie-downs are flat metal straps that connect on one end to long augurs that are sunk into the ground and on the other wrap around one of the two parallel I-beams that constitute the home’s frame. They look like this:
The newer form of tie-down is a rigid wing-strut that on one side clips on to one of the I-beams and on the other extends horizontally to the base of the cement blocks holding up the other I-beam and fastens to a pan that sits underneath the cement blocks and is bolted to the concrete footing underneath. Here’s a diagram:
Although the new style anchors take up less space, I assume that they provide the same amount of stability as the old-school anchors because a synod of engineers, cardinals, bishops, code enforcers and other government bureaucrats have approved them. This is counterintuitive. The old school anchors are set into the ground at the perimeter of the home, while the new anchors are set into the ground at the base of the I-beams, which are several feet inside the perimeter. One would think that the wider base of the old school anchors would provide greater stability. My guess is that what the new anchors lose in leverage they make up for in rigidity. Since old tie-downs are just straps, any given tie-down can only pull against force exerted against the frame of the home. By contrast, the newer, rigid strut-type tie-downs can both push and pull against any lateral force. Maybe that is why they do not require as broad a base of support.
A week ago last Wednesday, a surgeon shaved some bone tissue off my right clavicle and re-attached some of my rotator cuff tendons to the bone. You attach tendon to bone the way you attach manufactured homes to the ground using old-school tie-downs. You put an anchor into the hard tissue. That’s the augur, sunk into the ground. You sew what looks like metallic thread – that’s the tie-down straps – through the tendon, using a loop stitch. Then, you attach the thread to the anchor and tell the poor sap you operated on to keep his arm in a sling for six weeks for the tendon to heel around the thread. When the doctor told me how the operation went, he went thru some images and said, Here’s a picture of the first anchor. That one pulled out, so I had to put in another. Do you remember that?
-I do not.
-Don’t worry. That happens all the time.
-How long will I have to wear this thing?
-Six weeks, except when you shower and do PT.
My next meat-infrastructure project is a recurring inguinal hernia. The mechanics of a hernia are quite different from that of a tie-down. Think, instead, the collapse of Orangeburg sewer pipe, or a malfunctioning sewer lagoon.
The guy who installs homes for me is five foot one. He can crawl under a home and attach a tie-down like nobody else I have met. Before I bought my park in northern New York, a little person lived at Nine Kappa Street. I understand that he was a terrible tenant. An infinite loop of hookers, drug-dealers and miscellaneous low-lifes cycled through his home. His wife was normal-sized. You would think that their kids would split the difference, but half of them were normal-sized and half were midgets. All the family – father, mother, children, aunts, uncles – were incorrigible degenerates. The former owners had to get rid of the little guy, but while he lived there, he was great at climbing under homes, into septic tanks, and through culverts whenever work had to be done at close quarters. Not so, the rest of us. Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York, and Marshal, the maintenance man in central New York, are both big guys. The work they do is difficult enough as is. The tight spaces where they have to do it makes it even harder. Too bad they can’t do it laparoscopically, like a surgeon.
[1] A query, “Is Chat GPT a mechanical Turk?” typed into Chat GPT pulled up the following response: No, ChatGPT is not a Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is a marketplace operated by Amazon that allows businesses and individuals to outsource small tasks to a large, on-demand workforce. These tasks, known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), are completed by a global community of online workers, known as “Turkers”. ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI. It is a machine learning model that has been trained on a large dataset of text and is able to generate human-like text based on the prompts it receives. It is not a human worker and does not require any human input to generate text.