Me driving the lift, John that works for me doing the dyno surfing, and your buddy (our hero) Todd Brooks playing mild manner Site Foreman.
Let me tell you a small part of nite one (since you've asked about our small town but big bellied friend)................
On a 24 foot gooseneck trailer I brought 4 crates weighing a total of 3800lbs in from Richmond at about 8 or 9pm with Busa Todd that showed up to "ride along".
<insert picture I can't seem to find at the moment here>, but lets just say it had forklift operators Moe, Larry & Curly one moment then Laurel & Hardy the next (less the comedy act for any of them), under the employ of Yellow Freight (now known to me as "Mellow Fright").
After taking control of the situation and doing everything but comadering their lifts and "unused" radios, once they uloaded the wrong semi trailer (I think Todd said there was barbie dolls in the crate they first started to give us), we were on our way back north and never so glad to be.
Back at the ranch.............................
The forklift ran out of LP at this point
And in case you don't know, propane from a grill or just about any other bottles I have access to at that time of nite... do not have the same threads and there's no chance no matter how deep you dig in your old boxes you will not have anything to adapt it at what's about 11pm now.
Now this wouldn't be a problem you'd think because you noticed I have the 2300lb dyno crate in the shop already.
So I should just call it a nite, right?
Ohhhhh no you see.... there was 1500 lbs,
including a 950lb eddy current crate,
a 300lb ramp crate,
and a 250lb blower crate,
...still sitting on the trailer in the middle of the culdesac!
Now - with no forklift and it getting late quick and us tiring quicker... we had to get this stuff off the flat bed and in the building before calling it a nite. Not tough on the blowers or the ramp, simply uncrate them on the trailer and carry them in the shop. The load brake on the other hand... well it was almost 1000lbs and for what it cost it certainly wasn't sitting out over nite.
Now, on to better answering your question of who that other guy is. And although he looks like he is doing absolutely nothing in the pictures (and actually wasn't doing anything much of the time - lol)... he ended up being Superman that night.
So, there was Me, John, Todd and Deb all working at about 25% capacity and we got the 1000lb crate on some 3/4" plywood and all together slid it into the bed of Todd's pickup(which was luckily the perfect height), and manuevered it close enough to the shop that we could get air hose and a bike lift out there (with a built up platform high enough) to slide it out onto the lift.
Now it was slightly down hill, but there was only room for one person behind the crate in the truck, and I had John and Deb on the far side of the bike lift to use as human cushions for my long awaited and precious cargo should it decide to not stop moving once it got started. Busa Todd was the person of choice to get behind the eddy current unit as even though he and I were both down to about 15% capacity, his 15% was a lot heavier then my 15% should he be able to get it moving at all.
Now's where the big S on his chest appeared and the cape got donned, Todd2 moved that crate onto the lift (no matter how slowly) with the grace of a worn out guy in a toughman contest throwing his last engine block over the wall knwoing he needs to win the money to put a new roof on his trailer. And it was a complete success and we all breathed easy once we got the lift back down to the ground and used every bit of energy left in us to drag it in the shop and shut the doors and make it home by 1am.
The next morning (with a new bottle of LP in hand), and the remainder of the installation time actually... we had way too many smiles and much better breathing to even try remembering anything about that first nite.
So
"who was that man?" you ask.... well, so did we at about 1:30 am
Ok, the rest of the install I'll let you imagine verbally in your head should you decide to view a visual play by play and such from beginning to end here:
Singular photo version with a couple videos:
http://tinyurl.com/dy8w3b Slideshow version of above with photos only:
http://tinyurl.com/bpclm9 Hey, you know better then to ask me a simple question Franey.
Todd
