necessity is the mother of invention, or, as rodger ascham said, “Necessitie, the inuentour of all goodnesse.” weirdo. anyway, the father is certainly unyielding thriftiness. why buy a new, longer brake bridge when you can make something interesting with scraps from the shop floor? i couldn’t come up with a good answer to that question, and here is the result. of course i didn’t invent this bridge technique (see moyer, hufnagel, et. al), but it kind of felt that way at the time.