I've an aluminium loft ladder that's too old for me to remember where I got it from. I've just wondered about the safety of the locks between the two sections that appear to be 1cm-square plastic pins. Is this a normal thing for loft ladders or is it as inadequate as it appears?
As far as I can see, these are the end stops. Normally the ladder sections interlock to provide sufficient rigidity. It is a two section ladder, so the top section is supported also by the top mounting and the bottom section by the floor. Your very good picture seems to show that the plastic plug is in fact not fully loaded in the left hand section ie it is not touching the top of the hole it is passing through. In one of mine (3 section) the middle stops are in fact not engaged when the ladder is in use and it hasn't been a problem in 30 years. So I wouldn't worry.
It's hard to tell from the picture; mine has metal catches but only on one side and long ago I wrote to the manufacturer asking if I could/should put something on the other side too - they said it really was ok.
One has to presume that the shearing potential of the plastic pins has been considered; on the other hand we all know examples of plastics that have gone off over time and become much more brittle than they were at first.
For a while I contemplated making something that could be threaded through the inside hollow rungs on two adjacent sections (like in your pic, about 6" below the catch thing) to lock them together, but I couldn't see an easy way to do it. You could probably come up with some sort of external clamp that could be fitted around the ladder side-pieces at one or both sides and also jam apart the pair of rungs that are in the overlapping section. You'd need to be careful not to create a trip hazard/
As an aerial installer who often climbed other people's loft ladders my test was to visually inspect, then jump up and down on each section, braced in case the ladder failed. In 45 years I experienced few failures.
I've got one similar, albeit with metal locking pins; however I don't even use the pins at all!
This is because I can't extend the ladder far enough to engage the pins due to a bed at the foot of the ladder, so the ladder's held rigidly in position by the bedroom carpet and the pivot mounting at the top. Doesn't cause any problem at all.
The pivot looks a flimsy too but I guess it'll do for the moment.
I've just looked at a 3-section ladder in B&Q. The middle section must take the weight on the locking pins alone. And although the pins are metal, they are only about 5mm:
I can do reasonably swift photo editing with The Gimp. You should be able to do that with most reasonably feature-rich photo editors. If you are specifically interested in that particular effect, and are puzzled about how it was done, I could detail the steps.
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