There are only four pieces left in the shop now and each one only needs small areas of painting to be complete. By tomorrow at quitting time we should be ready to go. That means the crew did fantastic, finishing a big project three days before it is shipped. I love it when a plane comes together! :)
Almost done!
As we draw closer to next week’s shipping date for Vala’s Pumpkin Patch, the list of things that still need doing is now much shorter than the done list. That’s a very good thing! As each piece is completed it is rolled to the door and readied for shipment. The shop is beginning to feel a little empty. Tomorrow, two more major pieces and a few minor ones will be palletized and then moved outside to join the rest. That will leave only one large piece in the shop to be completed on Friday.
Getting ready to ship
As we reach the final stages of finishing the signs and features for Vala’s Pumpkin Patch we are also beginning the process of readying the pieces for shipment. getting our giant and HEAVY features for shipping is an art all by itself. As we built the features they were bolted to custom steel frames which have removable castors. These original frames were built as small as we could to allow the crew to work on the pieces and move ladders and such as close as possible. The features will be shipped inside a semi trailer. There is no way to tie them down. In order to keep them from sliding, tipping over or bumping into each other we weld up sturdy pallets around the original frames. Smaller features are bolted to empty places on the pallet to allow us to squeeze inn as much as we can. These new steel pallets are designed to slip inside the van trailer with less than an inch of clearance on each side. Bumpers on each end keep the pallets in line and allow us to push the heavy loads in and drag them out when we reach our destination. The features weigh up to 5,000 pounds each. Our customer will recycle the steel in the pallets as they are not worth the cost of shipping back to our shop.
