Packing - day two

The second container arrived this morning. These things are massive, forty feet long and weighing in at just over 8,000 pounds. Our driver dropped the container in a hurry right where we wanted it and was on her way.

A short while later John came back with his crane to slide in the KRAKEN. The fanciful submarine weighed in at 7,500 pounds. The space was tight between the two containers and our first try at flying the KRAKEN in fairly high was unsuccessful. It was too wide to go in that high.

So we set the KRAKEN down and nudged the container over. Our second attempt at flying it in at a lower altitde worked like a charm.

The first shipping container is now full and the second one is well under way to being the same. The parking lot is quickly emptying of finished pieces while in the shop the crew is busy creating a whole new crop.

Packing for a BIG journey

The first giant shipping container is now almost full. It's not like packing a moving van with some boxes and furniture for these features are so massively heavy. Simply wrapping them in bubble wrap and stuffing them into the container nice and tight wouldn't do any good. We don't know what they will encounter in their 7163 kilometer journey to Trinidad.

We have welded a sturdy frame for each piece and then securely bolted the built-in tabs of each feature to it. The frames for each feature interlock to ensure no possibility of movement anlong the way. The giant bins are packed from the front to the rear doors, one piece at a time. It's a painstaking process as the boys weld each frame and make sure everything is bolted securely in place.

Tomorrow they drop off the second container which will hold the KRAKEN and a bunch of smaller pieces. Stay tuned...

Thinking on the move

This morning was the time we've been waiting for for quite a while. At 8:00 sharp John Wishlow pulled into the yard with his big crane truck and it didn't take long to scope things out and set up the truck. The plan was to hook up the ship, lift it to the truck deck and then move the truck closer to the shipping container. John is a wonderful crane man, one of the smoothest on the controls that we have ever worked with. As the ship cleared the ground John called out the weight...   8,000 lbs. This is about what we figured.

We would then do a second lift into the giant metal bin. Peter and I would guide it in.

Each piece had been carefully measured and planned to go into a standard shipping container with an inch of clearance on each side. But this was not a standard container as it was an open top. It turns out they have a beam running down each side to provide stability. This made the container one inch too narrow to lower the ship down through the top.  But there is always a solution if we think things through...   After considering a bunch of options we decided to move the ship to the center of the container (lengthwise) where there was the most flexibility and then rest the ship frame on one side while lowering the other. Once the ship was under the beam on one side we would use crowbars to slide it over and then the second side would pop nto the container too. It was a tricky operation and it was defnitely scary but it worked perfectly and the ship went in without a scratch.

The next challenge will of course be to remove the ship from the container in Trinidad. This will be much easier as we can unbolt the shipping cradle before we lift the ship with the crane and it should come out cleanly. It will then be placed down on it's permanent foundation in the center of the pool.

While the crane was onsite we also moved the archway we had built for Peter and Hailey's wedding. It was lifted onto the deck of the truck, tied into place and then transported down the street to their house.

The challenge here (and there are ALWAYS challenges) was to get the arch under the telephone wires and through the hedge before moving it into place. We inspected the hedge carefully and found two trees that were a little wider spaced than the rest. The arch would squeeze through without difficulty.

Once the hard part was done it was a simple matter of dropping it onto the foundation that was already in place.

I love it when a plan comes together - even if we have to figure it out as we go.