Logbook entry № 1 · Duncan Macleod
About Duncan Macleod
First noted
Twenty-four years as a hoistway mechanic on the tower above Bremner Boulevard, and how this personal notebook came to exist.
I am Duncan Macleod. I am sixty-three years old, I live within a short walk of Bremner Boulevard, and I spent twenty-four years as a hoistway mechanic on the tower that defines our skyline. My working day began with a walk through the service entrance, a briefing with the night shift, and a careful review of the overnight log for anything the next team should keep an eye on.
I came to the work through a traditional apprenticeship. In my early twenties I was a trainee on the harbour grain elevators, which taught me that quiet machinery is almost always better machinery. A friend of my uncle moved me onto the tower crew in the late 1980s and I never left. In those years the control system was a mechanical relay matrix, the maintenance was still measured in hours of hands-on work, and the small differences between a well-adjusted lift and a tired one were obvious from the way the cab settled at a floor.
My specialty was the wind damper assemblies that sit near the top of the mast. A high building sways. The architects knew this and designed a set of damper rings that absorb the energy of a lateral oscillation and convert it into a very small amount of heat. The dampers are inspected on a regular rotation and replaced when the viscous fluid in their damping chambers no longer meets the acceptance test. I spent many winter nights in a safety harness verifying torque on bolts the size of my fist, and I will not pretend it was romantic work. It was cold, slow, and important.
Retirement came in a quiet fashion during the pandemic. I did not want a goodbye party. The team organised a small lunch with the three apprentices I had trained in my last five years, and we talked about the parts of the job that had not changed and the parts that had. The control system had moved to a modern distributed computer, the lift cabs were quieter, and the diagnostics were more accurate. The physics of a long guide rail against a heavy cab, though, had not changed at all. That was the thread that connected my first apprenticeship to my last.
I started this notebook three months after I retired. A neighbour asked me to walk her visiting cousin through a Sunday afternoon at the tower and I realised I was describing the same observations I had been giving apprentices for twenty years. The notebook is my attempt to keep those observations in one place. It is intentionally slow. I write when I have something to say, and I correct pages when a reader catches a small inaccuracy.
Several things I do not do. I do not sell admission or book meals. I do not arrange tours or act as a travel agent. I do not accept sponsorship from the operator of the building or from any agency that profits from a visit. I do not place advertising on these pages. The site is independent because it is more useful that way.
If you have a correction, a dated observation, or a question that a page here does not answer, send me a letter. I prefer written correspondence to e-mail because a letter encourages the kind of specific detail that is most useful. The address is on the contact page.
— D.M.