Some years ago, I was installing a stainless steel liner in my 100 y.o. chimney. The house is basically a square with a truncated pyramid for a roof and a hatch to access the roof. A friend had some fairly heavy stainless steel sheet that had been rolled into 4 ft. cylinders. I rolled up the sheet to make 8" by 4 ft fully welded sections and flared one end so I could stack them.
The plan was to assemble the stack from the roof top bye stacking the sections, welding the joint and lowering the assembly down the chimney, one section at a time. To accomplish this, I hauled my MIG welder up to the roof and made a rig with two cables with clips running down the outside of the assembly with a boat winch for lowering. All was going well as I welded and lowered eight sections.
The last bit though got hung up, the chimney not being perfectly straight, In an effort to jar it loose, I released the tension on the cables so the column could drop the last few inches a pounded on column , Drop it did, trapping my thumb between the column and the winch in the process. From the intense pain I was expecting that my thumb was history. However I was duly trapped. A friend was down two floors in my living room watching a Saturday football game but despite yelling at the top of my lungs down the stainless shaft, I couldn't get his attention.
I stared down at my thumb, fully expecting it to be damaged beyond repair and onot wanting to end up a skeleton on a rooftop, decided to pull it free. I could just reach a pair of vise grips which I used to pry the two pieces of metal apart and I gritted my teeth and pulled my thumb to freedom.
Climbing down to ground level, I took a close look and discovered to my relief that the damage wasn't nearly as bad as I first thought. I had a cut on the pad of my thumb and lost some skin but no broken bone. A quick bandage and back to work. After all, Ihad a welder on the roof that had to come down.
