Welcome back to the never-ending saga… here we go again.

With the epoxy disaster complete, the next thing on the extremely long list was to prep the machines in Saugus for moving. And by prep, I mean excavate.

Excavate? Yes, Excavate.

The machines were literally buried under about 6 feet of stuff, including hundreds of carburetors, at least 50 truck starter motors, at least 200lbs of NiMH and lead acid batteries, at least 20 small Briggs and Stratton small engines, super old welding gear, about six massive generators, and more heavy stuff. The two photos below were taken after about four hours of hardcode cleaning of me, Aaron, and Nick:

So, Aaron, Nick, and I went HARD. This was part of the deal- we got the machines for a pretty low price, but we owed a solid day of cleaning to excavate them. Anna also showed up to inspect the rubble!

After about six hours, the floor became visible.

I have to give Aaron a great deal of credit for exceptional junk sorting skills. I’ve never seen a man sort/plow through junk faster than him! Everyone was very impressed. One thing that the people wanted was for us to sort out the scrap metal separately from the trash, so that their friend could make a couple bucks on it. We probably sorted at least 1000 lbs of scrap metal. This is the pile about halfway through, it was at least 4′ tall by the time we were done. We also filled most of a 20 yard dumpster with actual trash.

One cool machine we uncovered was a Sebastian pedal powered lathe, which the owners had advised us might exist at the bottom of the pile. Definitely a pretty cool machine, probably dates to around 1900. Sadly, not much use to me because of the Hardinge, so I opted to leave it. However, this should definitely go to a good home.

This post definitely does not quite convey how much stuff/mass we moved, without even touching the machines yet-should have taken more photos! We must have moved at least 1000 lbs of stuff, more likely 2000 lbs. Thank you Aaron!

A good day. Read on for part 4: the great moving.