Have we lost the plot ?

[little john]

Someone recently asked about Slatted Racks. Now - I don't use them, know nothing about them, nor have they ever featured on my radar ...  But, maybe I've been missing something - who knows ?  And so out of curiosity I did a Google.

What immediately struck me was the marked difference between the precision inherent within several examples of DIY plans, and the equally precise standard of construction of commerically-made Slatted Racks - that is, when compared with the Racks actually used by the inventor, CC Miller.



It looks as if Miller has used an axe to roughly split a few boards in order to make battens, which have then been spaced very approximately as if forming the rungs of a ladder. This 'ladder rack' is then installed within an eke placed below the brood box such that the battens are positioned close to the bottoms of the frames above them. Crude, and roughly made - but it worked sufficiently well that he writes with enthusiasm about their use.

Now I'm as guilty as the next bloke of using table saws and routers to construct boxes with sub-millimetric dimensional accuracies - but is this standard of construction always necessary in the business of housing insects within boxes ?

Maybe next time I have the table router running, I'll consider using an axe instead ... or then again, maybe I won't - for many years spent in engineering have conditioned me into a particular way of doing things. But already I've started to wonder if I might actually have lost the plot somewhere along the way ...

LJ

[SB-Russ]

So there may be hope for me yet. I knew eyeballing measurements was the way to go 

[Michael Bush]

Maybe it helps to see the evolution of the concept.  First Miller went to extra deep bottom boards for the winter so the dead bees wouldn't clog things up.  Then he decided to use them in the summer.  He liked the results except for the wild comb, so he make a rack that slid into the entrance that  would keep them from building comb in the space.  He used the extra deep bottoms with a slide in rack.  Later someone made one that went on top of a regular bottom and left the extra space.  I'm guessing that Dadant etc. didn't want to have someone with an ax cutting them...

[texanbelchers]

I suspect the push for standardization and mass production brought us to the uniform cuts we see now.  I just can't get good wood!  I cut it accurately, assemble it into nice square shapes, and paint it well.  Yet, everything warps, cracks, splits and generally looks like I cut it with an ax and assembled with rail road spikes.      Maybe I'll use that PVC stuff and prove it will deform too.

[KeyLargoBees]

Its the heat and humidity TB not your carpentry skills.....Houston is miserable in August....still have horrible memories of two a day practices in late August at Dulles HS out on the SW side :-)