Thread: A Little Adventure

Me and son went up to Newcastle last week to pick up my thicknesser I bought 6 months ago but only just now found the time to go and get. Anyway we rock up to the shed and took one look at it and said S!!!T, how are we going to get that on the trailer, it looked bloody heavy and is heavy. We stripped the motor off it, all the guards, etc and it was still too heavy, I reckon it weighs in the region of 350kg. It took us over an hour to persuade it on the trailer with rope and muscle and that was from the time we got it to the tailgate to it laying in the trailer. I brought home a Jet 18" bandsaw and it was lighter than this thing.

Tonight we put the motor on, it took a chain hoist and floor jack to lift the motor it being about 50kg, we finally got it on and decided to lift the whole machine and put some stronger wheels under it, well that's where the trouble started. We had it hoisted on a makeshift tripod and it sort of gave way and the whole lot fell over. Well now we were in deep do do, this thing is on its side and I am getting splinters in the end of me fingers scratching my head trying to figure out how to get it up on its feet. You see, we had a real problem, SWMBO has her sewing room under my garage and the gear box in the thicknesser was leaking oil and I was trying to figure out how long the divorce was going to take as the floor had suffered a small hole in it during the fall.

We eventually stood it up with a floor jack and some long levers, it is amazing how quick you can work when the wrath of the woman is about to fall upon you. We jacked it up a bit, shoved some jack stands under it and kept going until we could get two long levers under it and got it upright. You know what? I still haven't got the castors under the bloody thing and I have to lift it again now. If it hadn't been leaking oil I would have done it then while it was on it's side. I didn't have the camera either, the missus had that with her tonight, that was the lucky bit, she wasn't here.