Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'
Sorry for the belated post.
The critical move of the ice equipment occurred on Saturday, April 27, 2019.
After months and months of speculation as to whether or not we would be able to roll up the ice mat, we finally got our answer. Drumroll please.....
Yes. Yes, in fact we are able to roll the mats up! This was great news as it meant we would not have to parade 7 105 ft long ice mats 200 yards down Wells Street carried by 20 or so members. It would have been a sight to see but likely would have required us to get a parade permit! :-)
David Michael, our construction manager, had arranged for a forklift for us from his employer, Michael Kinder & Sons, to help with the move. The night before, I thought it would be helpful to have another forklift on the other end of the move. Unfortunately, I thought of this 1 hour after McAllister Rentals closed, but luckily Sunbelt Rentals was open on Saturday. I swung by on the way to the club and found out that they don't deliver on equipment on weekends. Dismayed, I got to the club and talked to the team about wanting to rent a second forklift. Most didn't see the value in it and were concerned that it would kill too much time. Undeterred, I pushed forward and convinced John Sherman to hook the trailer up to his truck and see if we could pick up a forklift.
Sunbelt would allow us to pick it up but needed to confirm our trailer was able to handle the weight of the forklift. Unfortunately, they couldn't confirm it because they couldn't see the specifications on the trailer itself. They said they are not allowed to put this forklift on single axle trailers that they have but it "might" be OK on ours. They said we could make the call. Being the risk taker that I am, we had them load the forklift on the trailer and drove it to the new facility.
Luckily it wasn't very far, because the trailer was struggling with the weight, but we made it. We dropped the trailer at the new facility and went back to the old facility where we learned that the original forklift would no longer operate. It had been stalling frequently and now wouldn't start at all. The good news was that we had rented the other forklift before Sunbelt closed. The bad news was that the working forklift was at the new club and that the dead forklift was impeding the ability to get to the dehumidifier. So, we went back to the new club and had to drive the forklift down Wells Street to the old club. And we would have to do this each and every trip...back and forth, back and forth...on a cold and rainy day.
The day started off nice, at least. We rolled the mats up and removed the insulation under the mats. We loaded the insulation onto pallets and transported it outside using the forklift. From there, we manually loaded the insulation into the dumpster. Yes, we could have dumped it in using the forklift but we wanted to fit as much as possible into each dumpster.
Then we rolled the mats out again and rolled them up more tightly. The mats still had a substantial amount of glycol in them (further increasing their weight) but they did roll quite well and quite easily. All of our months full of consternation were for naught.
The critical move of the ice equipment occurred on Saturday, April 27, 2019.
After months and months of speculation as to whether or not we would be able to roll up the ice mat, we finally got our answer. Drumroll please.....
Yes. Yes, in fact we are able to roll the mats up! This was great news as it meant we would not have to parade 7 105 ft long ice mats 200 yards down Wells Street carried by 20 or so members. It would have been a sight to see but likely would have required us to get a parade permit! :-)
David Michael, our construction manager, had arranged for a forklift for us from his employer, Michael Kinder & Sons, to help with the move. The night before, I thought it would be helpful to have another forklift on the other end of the move. Unfortunately, I thought of this 1 hour after McAllister Rentals closed, but luckily Sunbelt Rentals was open on Saturday. I swung by on the way to the club and found out that they don't deliver on equipment on weekends. Dismayed, I got to the club and talked to the team about wanting to rent a second forklift. Most didn't see the value in it and were concerned that it would kill too much time. Undeterred, I pushed forward and convinced John Sherman to hook the trailer up to his truck and see if we could pick up a forklift.
Sunbelt would allow us to pick it up but needed to confirm our trailer was able to handle the weight of the forklift. Unfortunately, they couldn't confirm it because they couldn't see the specifications on the trailer itself. They said they are not allowed to put this forklift on single axle trailers that they have but it "might" be OK on ours. They said we could make the call. Being the risk taker that I am, we had them load the forklift on the trailer and drove it to the new facility.
Luckily it wasn't very far, because the trailer was struggling with the weight, but we made it. We dropped the trailer at the new facility and went back to the old facility where we learned that the original forklift would no longer operate. It had been stalling frequently and now wouldn't start at all. The good news was that we had rented the other forklift before Sunbelt closed. The bad news was that the working forklift was at the new club and that the dead forklift was impeding the ability to get to the dehumidifier. So, we went back to the new club and had to drive the forklift down Wells Street to the old club. And we would have to do this each and every trip...back and forth, back and forth...on a cold and rainy day.
The day started off nice, at least. We rolled the mats up and removed the insulation under the mats. We loaded the insulation onto pallets and transported it outside using the forklift. From there, we manually loaded the insulation into the dumpster. Yes, we could have dumped it in using the forklift but we wanted to fit as much as possible into each dumpster.
Then we rolled the mats out again and rolled them up more tightly. The mats still had a substantial amount of glycol in them (further increasing their weight) but they did roll quite well and quite easily. All of our months full of consternation were for naught.
Once we got the mats rolled up, we secured them and got them up onto a sheet of plywood situated on a pallet. We took them outside using the pallet jack or forklift and Greg pressure washed them to get as much of the residual white paint off them as possible.
Once washed, we wrapped them in plastic and loaded them onto a trailer. 2 at a time...with only one minor mishap where a roll dropped. We don't believe any damage was incurred.
We then, very, very, very carefully, drove them over to the new facility, with the empty forklift leading the way. Luckily it is only about 200 yards down the road. The biggest risk was the fact that the entrance into the curling club is pretty steep and each time the trailer went down that incline, we cringed. But we had no issues!
We then used the forklift to load the ice mats into the ground unit trailer that we leased for storage space.
We thought quite a bit about how much space in the trailer the mats would take up but what we didn't think about was whether the trailer was tall enough for the mats once they were on a pallet. Turns out....
Just barely. Less than half an inch of room to spare and bringing them in we had even less than that. But thank the lord, they did fit. We were able to get ALL of the mats from the old club into the ground unit which will allow them to stay out of the way during construction.
Once we were done with the mats, we needed to get the dehumidifier down and moved to the new facility. Huge thanks to our resident forklift expert, John Sherman, for his masterful work all day with the forklift. Without him, things could have gone much, much worse.
Last but not least was getting the scraper ready for transport, loaded onto the trailer and transported to the new facility.
It was a long, hard, dirty, wet, nasty bit of work but we got it done. It took us from about 8:30 am until 3:00 pm and we wouldn't have been able to do it without the help of:
- John Sherman
- Andrew Nottingham
- Greg Eigner
- Bob Leckron
- Lynne Leckie
- Shawn Wall
- Mandy Gangwer
- Bob Sweazey
- Bruce Hayes
- Tom Kaufman
- Craig Fischer
Comments
Post a Comment