The top of the barn has moved! It took about 4 hours this morning of cleaning up, building ramps and rigging but it moved just like I planned it. In fact, once I had it down off the blocks I could roll it myself. Of course, this only reinforced my fear of it running away from me once it got on the ramps. If you look at the right side of the photo, you can see the old Allis back there. I used the tractor as an anchor and hooked a chain and a come-a-long between it and the barn. I did the same thing in the front with the pickup as the anchor. I pulled it tight in the front, loosened the back and repeated the process about a dozen times 'til I had it on the flat. As me ole' grandpappy used to say: "Slicker than snot on a doorknob".
The Missus came out while I was doing the deed and she asked where I got all the chain from. I did borrow a piece from my shop at school but technically, that one belongs to me as well. I was thinking about the same thing myself the other day while I was gearing up for this job. I got lucky with the axles but other than some hardware, the only thing I had to buy to pull this off was another length of air hose. Not many guys have 150 feet of air hose and extension cords, two floor jacks, impact wrench, thread chasers for the U-bolts on the axles, and all the carpenter tools to do this thing, plus have the ability to shorten the axles and engineer the whole job. And if you look in the foreground of the photo, you can see my old green hard hat from my days as a millwright. That's an essential piece of equipment when crawling around underneath the lid to a barn.
The point of all this is not to blow my own horn (even though I did give myself an "Atta Boy") but to point out that if you pay attention and you work around this kind of stuff for a number of years, first of all you'll be amazed at all the tools and equipment you accumulate, and secondly, you'll reach a point where even if you've never done something before, you've probably seen it done or know somebody who has done it. And even if none of that holds true, you'll just say screw it, I'll give it a go. Surly made himself a Garagemobile a couple of years back, and he'd never done anything like that before. A good solid mechanical background and a little help from his friends and it was done. The thing of it is, guys used to do this kind of stuff all the time. Lots of farmers still do. There is no app for your cool as hell cell phone that will get it done no matter how many damn "G's" you got on your wireless network, though. You have to get up off the couch and build things. Use your brain, use your hands, use your back. And when appropriate, seek advice and mechanical advantage.
So now it's clean up the newly exposed barn floor, prepare the sill plates, build some walls and be thinking about lifting the lid back on. I hope to be building walls next week but of course, that's always weather dependent. I'm heading to Oklahoma at the end of the week for Jimmy's fight and I'm working the blacksmith shop at the fair again the week after, so barn time is going to be at a premium. I'm about 90% on the plans for the lifting cradle. I need to have a little think time to make some sketches and then I can start on that part of the job. I figured if the first part didn't go well, no point in worrying about the second part. Now I can start to worry.
Weekend's just about here - enjoy it. I'm going into this one feeling pretty good.
2 comments:
Wow.... I knew you'd do it, but it's still an impressive process to think through.
kevin2117: Thanks, buddy. Still a long way from being done but this was a big step.
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