Heavy lifting

My shop is a mess, and at the moment you can barely move in it. Fortunately, I mean this in the best way possible.

As youll recall from last time, Ive just gotten an assignment to write four tool articles, all but one of them on large stationary machines. The deliveries took place last Friday (the 18-wheeler carrying it couldnt get into my neighborhood on Thursday, and they had to take it back and get a smaller truck), and until Sunday the shop was littered with several very heavy boxes.

Now, its littered with assembled tool bases/stands, assorted smaller parts and components, four sets of manuals and bags of hardware, and many cubic yards of molded Styrofoam packing. The thing about unpacking woodworking machines is that once you have them unpacked, they take up twice as much room: The space taken up by the machine itself, and the space taken up by the shipping crate and all the packing, which I have to hang on to for the time being. And to top all of that off, I still have two very heavy boxes that contain the main machines themselves. And until a very large friend comes over to help me horse those things up out of their boxes and onto their bases/stands, thats pretty much the way things are going to stay.

Truth be told, I did get one of the machines set up last night with the help of my wife. The machine itself was dissembled enough for shipping that I managed to get all the parts but one out by myself. The last, although quite heavy, required lifting for less than four seconds, and my wife managed to help me out with that. Barely. But that still leaves two large masses of cast iron languishing there on my shop floor, laughing at me.

And until my friend comes over after hes off work tonight, thats the way its all going to stay. In the meantime, the best I can do is read all the manuals for about the 10th time and keep sweeping up what seems like thousands of tiny static-charged bits of Styrofoam floating everywhere in the shop.

Till next time,

A.J.