I have watched this job done in every decade you can name, and I want you to understand what the Baiardo is actually solving. Stringing is not hard on the hands. It is hard on the back. Hours of bending over a frame at a fixed height, twisting to reach the far side, and then doing it again tomorrow. Everyone I knew who strung for a living had the same complaint, and most of them had it by forty.
So: Biomechanically Efficient Stringing Technology, which Wilson shortens to B.E.S.T., and which is three separate motors that move the machine three times during a single string job — once when you mount the frame, once for the mains, once for the crosses — adjusting height and tilt so the work comes to the stringer rather than the other way round.
The positions are calculated from the user's height, and they can be customised and recalled for up to six different people through a multilingual touch screen. That is a clubhouse solved.
Six stringers, six saved bodies.
A six-point mounting system with 360-degree rotation. A self-guiding tension head that takes one motion to lock the string and pull tension with a flick of a finger, rather than the two-handed fiddle. And a modular design, so a worn part comes out and a new one goes in without the machine leaving the room.
The rest is the professional kit you would expect.
Note that these now ship with black clamps rather than the old chrome ones.
Nelson, and I remember it before the tarmac. Christ Church Cathedral stands at the head of Trafalgar Street walled in ground Takaka marble, and Trafalgar Street runs straight at it, which is the sort of thing you only get when somebody sets the line before the town exists.
Which brings me to the Centre of New Zealand monument on Botanical Hill: that is the zero point of the 1870s surveys, the peg everything else was measured from. I knew the men who set it. Lovely afternoon, terrible sandwiches.
The Suter Art Gallery sits beside Queens Gardens, and out at Tahunanui the beach runs long with the dunes rebuilt behind it. Rebuilt, mind. They looked better before. They always do.
"Everything in this town was measured from one peg on a hill."
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