"Unless you are prepared to accept the proven scientific fact that hard work makes you tired, and that very hard work makes you tired very quickly I see no point in wasting my time replying further."

Gordon. that's an inarguable scientific fact, of course, but it also has a further implication - easy work makes you tired very slowly.

At Foamhenge it was obvious that hard work makes you tired very quickly, but that cannot be taken as proof that dragging was an ineffective method, merely that the number of pullers was at the lower limit of viability for the method. Had their been two or three times as many then the work would have been easy and they could have done it all day, surely? If you say, no, there are reasons why it would still have been hard then I would keep adding to the numbers until it wasn't...

"Again you either miss my point or choose to ignore it."

No, I understand the point you made and you have made it many times before, but as I said, it's all a question of gearing.

"You have stated on this thread that 2 men can drag a ton, presumably up a 1 in 10 ramp as we were talking about the pyramids. I have a 12 ton stone, how far can you move it per day with 24 men?"

Now you are misquoting me. I said that for your proposed method to operate at a slope of 1 in 15 you would need a coefficient of friction of 6%. If you can achieve that level of friction then two men per ton would be able to pull it on the same track on level ground.

Your proposed method does nothing to overcome friction and therefore gravity has to do the same work as draggers would have to do to move your stone over the same sort of track. To get gravity to do the work, you have to raise the stone high enough to give it that same amount of potential energy and that actually requires more total energy input than dragging because you lose quite a lot of energy during the lifting process due to bending of the levers, compression of the packings and the lowering that occurs after each packing is inserted.

The reason that your effort is lower is because of the gearing. It's like riding a bike. It's hard work trying to ride in top gear all the time, but you don't go very fast if you stay in bottom gear all the time either.

You can similarly reduce the gearing of dragging by employing more men. At Foamhenge we had the same number of people dragging that were previously rowing and they just managed to move the stone with a lot of effort. By the time the number had been doubled the stone was moving very quickly, much more than twice the speed of rowing, so it's all a question of matching the number of men to what is both a comfortable working speed and not too strenuous an effort. Stone-rowing (and your proposed method) are easy because they use a very low gearing, but they go very slowly by comparision and therefore you're in bottom gear all the time. To get a comparable throughput you have to use multiple teams and the overall man-hours probably works out about the same.

Rather than talking hypothetically, I think you need to go away and see what kind of slope you need to use to run a real stone down a wooden track. Then we can discuss whether the system is really a viable challenger to dragging.