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Not a Poseur, Just Prepared! (no G content)

921 views 0 replies 1 participant last post by  Hipine 
#1 ·
One of the other engineers where I work had received some equipment in a sea container late Friday afternoon. I was about ready to head out to enjoy my weekend when George persuaded me to come have a look at this container.

The dock hands at work had already removed one pallet from the container under George's guidance. Aparently it hadn't gone well, as George asked me, "Do you know what's under here?" Pointing to a protruding portion of the mylar-foil wrapping. I told him I thought it was the boom mounting for the operator interface and his response was, "Oh, good. I was afraid it was something important. We whacked that pretty hard against the container when the pallet tipped the first time we lifted it." I cringed a bit and walked inside the container to where the dock hands were pondering the second, much larger, pallet.

This pallet was as wide as the container, minus an inch on each side, and was about 14 ft long, loaded with a very large and heavy piece of equipment. The guys had figured out that the exposed end of the pallet was toe-nailed into the container floor with some HUGE nails, and while they had been able to free that end of the pallet by lifting with the fork lift until the nails pulled loose, they couldn't lift the pallet because the forks on the lift were nowhere near long enough to reach its center of gravity.

They were thinking about getting some extended forks, but even they would not have been long enough to securely support the load. Not to mention the fork lift they had was very much undersized for the job. I convinced them to bring me a choker chain and a hole saw, drilled a hole in the center of the pallet's width, and told them we'd chain the pallet to the fork lift and just drag it out. I got it hooked up, and the fork lift stalled on it's attempt to pull the pallet.

Ted, one of our technicians who's a good bit skinnier than I was able to wriggle over and around the equipment on the pallet, and get to the far end to confirm that, yes indeed, it was nailed to the floor on that end as well, with no hope of pulling those monster nails sunk through about 6" of oak by hand, the group was wondering what to do.

My first thought was to get some 10' 6x6 timbers from the local lumber yard, lift the accessable end of the pallet as far as we could and slide those timbers underneath as far as we could shove them, hoping that letting the accessable end of the pallet back down would then lever the far end off the floor far enough to pull the nails, or at least allow us to cut them off. But then I remembered the Hi-Lift jack bolted securely to the side of the roof rack on the G! I asked Ted if he had about 4" of floor space available on the far end of the pallet, and he said he thought he had just about that much before the next pallet forward started. I asked him what he thought about boring a hole in the pallet, looping the choker chain around the pallet timbers, and using a Hi-Lift to jack the pallet up, pulling the nails out of the floor. He said he thought that would work fine, but didn't know where he'd get a jack like that. I told him I'd be right back with one!

The jack worked a treat and we soon had that monster pallet on it's way dragging it out of the container. We used the jack again to free some wedge timbers they'd driven in and secured with nails again to hold the smaller pallet at the very front of the container.

So you see, driving around with that jack up there, I'm not a poseur, just prepared!

And naturally, I was very disappointed and sad to have to save the day like that. [:D] I think the only thing that would have been better is if I'd had to use the G's winch to drag the pallets out of the container. [:p]

-Dave G.
 
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