[TheForge] Upsetter & bender

[Mike Spencer]

> Mike, it's all those little pieces add up to a lot of work in
> moving.

Say, Ralph, I didn't notice that. :-)  Only three more pickup loads of
that to go, I think.

>  Do you plan to store your steel  horizontally or vertically??

Horizontally.  I left space specifically for a 20' rack on one wall.
But it isn't made yet because there's no power for the welder yet,
just 100' or so of 14 ga. from the house.

> From moving and rigging 36 businesses/shops I've come to find the
> storage and shelving, etc to be the most important thing in moving a
> shop and actually ending up with any room to work in the space when
> your done moving everything in to it.

And I've been spoiled rotten.  The shop I'm leaving was formerly a
large general store and it came with sturdy 12" shelves floor to
ceiling on every available bit of wall.  So far I'm doing okay for
organization/storage but the miscelaneous short lengths of bar stock
and useful scraps and shapes are going to be a problem.  More of it
than I'd prefer will likely end up on pallets behind the building
because I hate stumbling over junk when I'm working.  And the things I
only use once every couple of years -- e.g the sheetmetal jennies --
and the restorations in progress -- e.g. 24" bandsaw and single banger
gas engines -- are filling too much of a corner.  The 4x4 welding table
will be on casters so it can move out of the way as needed.

All worth it, I hope, because I'll have my shop in the field by the
house, not 17 miles away in the middle of a village.

> I like your idea of the utlimate drive on wagon alignment
> machine.......maybe that's where Bear Alignment got it's first ideas
> for the drive on machines from four of those sitting in a shop
> somewheres.  :-)

Well, Cecil Parnell, the now deceased wizard fixer of all thing metal,
told me that he dropped out of school after the third grade and went
to work in the woods on a major logging operation up along the Mersey
River.  This would have been about 1920 or so and it was all horses
and wagons or bobsleds.  His job was to stand next a pair of greased
ramps with a grease bucket.  When a wagon began to haul hard, the
teamster would drive it between the ramps and it would be lifted off
its wheels as the ramps slid under the axle beams.  Then Cecil would
pull all four wheels, slap a handfull of grease on each axle and put
the wheels back on.  Teamster would start the horses and the wagon
would slide off the ramps and back to work.  Sounds easy but I'll bet
it was an exhausting job for a 10- or 12-year old, even one of Cecil's
excessively robust build.

- Mike
---
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada 
                                 
mspencer@tallships.ca            
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/