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The printing press has not only arrived, it is sitting proudly in my basement.
Thursday morning, I rented a very large truck and drove with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
corivax and xmurf to Tacoma. It was a pretty nice truck, possibly the largest I've ever driven, but not quite large enough. I made a mistake when reserving it, and got one that wasn't actually loading dock height. And the liftgate, while plenty strong enough, wasn't quite deep enough. More on this later.
The shipping depot was much smaller and lower stress than I feared. They cheerfully loaded the pallet onto the truck with a forklift, so the height of the bed wasn't an issue.
Getting it back to Seattle was not a problem. And there it was, 1300 pounds of slightly top-heavy metal, 4 feet off the ground.
Withcorivax off at a conference, xmurf and adularia were kind enough to come help. We bought two very large prybars and starting prying. As it slowly moved towards the raised liftgate, a couple things became evident:
We stood there (there being anywhere except underneath it) and pondered. And decided that, as long as it couldn't tip, nothing could go wrong. Of course, we couldn't just hold on it, since all of us together wouldn't even be half its weight. So we used a cargo strap to hold the top of the press steady. We'd lower the liftgate a couple inches, then let the strap out a bit. Slow and nervewracking, but it worked.
Once it was down, we were able to pry it off the liftgate without any problems. The next day I rented a pallet jack and rolled it into the basement.
I just finished spraying a whole bunch of penetrating oil and testing various bolts on the thing. I'm happy to say that it looks like it should disassemble fairly easily. I'm sure a couple parts are actually rusted solid, but not most. There are several spring still in place and functional, so it obviously hasn't had time to rust too badly. (Being high carbon steel, springs tend to rust away very quickly.) I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to perform a complete refurbishment on this magnificent machine.
Thursday morning, I rented a very large truck and drove with
corivax and xmurf to Tacoma. It was a pretty nice truck, possibly the largest I've ever driven, but not quite large enough. I made a mistake when reserving it, and got one that wasn't actually loading dock height. And the liftgate, while plenty strong enough, wasn't quite deep enough. More on this later.The shipping depot was much smaller and lower stress than I feared. They cheerfully loaded the pallet onto the truck with a forklift, so the height of the bed wasn't an issue.
Getting it back to Seattle was not a problem. And there it was, 1300 pounds of slightly top-heavy metal, 4 feet off the ground.
With
corivax off at a conference, xmurf and adularia were kind enough to come help. We bought two very large prybars and starting prying. As it slowly moved towards the raised liftgate, a couple things became evident:- The pallet was a bit wider than the liftgate
- The liftgate sagged a little bit under the weight
- Having 1300 pounds of tippy iron cantilevered out on a little platform was really, deeply scary.
We stood there (there being anywhere except underneath it) and pondered. And decided that, as long as it couldn't tip, nothing could go wrong. Of course, we couldn't just hold on it, since all of us together wouldn't even be half its weight. So we used a cargo strap to hold the top of the press steady. We'd lower the liftgate a couple inches, then let the strap out a bit. Slow and nervewracking, but it worked.
Once it was down, we were able to pry it off the liftgate without any problems. The next day I rented a pallet jack and rolled it into the basement.
I just finished spraying a whole bunch of penetrating oil and testing various bolts on the thing. I'm happy to say that it looks like it should disassemble fairly easily. I'm sure a couple parts are actually rusted solid, but not most. There are several spring still in place and functional, so it obviously hasn't had time to rust too badly. (Being high carbon steel, springs tend to rust away very quickly.) I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to perform a complete refurbishment on this magnificent machine.
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Now all you have to do is publish political tracts on broadsheet, and you're in business!
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