FINALLY- the big day. October 10th, 2020. The day where I increase the weight of my personal possessions by approximately 5000 lbs. Nothing like moving nearly 40 times your body mass.

Let’s back up one day though to the day before though, to October 9th, where I did some pre-move moving. I cleaned up a bit around the various tools, mostly around the Hardinge. The drawers on the Hardinge were the ‘summer set’ of drawers, as in, the wooden drawers had expanded and completely jammed about 6 inches open.

By aggressively rocking the drawers from side to side and up/down, I could get them to shift slightly in their slots. I spent about an hour wiggling all three drawers out, one millimeter at a time. How exhausting.

The other task was to reopen the door at the pack of the garage, which opened into a shed which I guess will serve as a sort of mudroom for the machine shop. Removing the plywood just required removing a few nails, and this old “Fro-joy” Ice Cream sign.

Additionally, in one of my previous trips to Home Depot, I acquired several lengths of 1″ PVC tube. Aaron and Al highly recommended the PVC tube Egyptian method as a way to move the machines. I was originally skeptical of this method, but it actually worked incredibly well.

Alright, time to get a good night’s sleep- because tomorrow is going to be a long day.

We met at Saugus at about 10am.. aaron refused to wake up any earlier (lol). I also stopped by home depot to get supplies, and met a 92 year old WW2 vet who apparently flew P-51s over Europe in WW2 when he was seventeen. WW2 vets are not very common these days- he said “Sadly I do not have too many old friends.” We talked for a bit, he was a cool guy.

The Linley was the first to get moved. I bought a bunch of 2x4s and 2x6s at Home Depot, and decided to use the 2x4s for this machine as I thought it was lighter. This turned out to be a mistake, definitely should have used 4x4s, but whatever. Turned out OK. We were lucky enough to have an electric gantry crane installed in the place, which was super useful.

The machine tool moving process was:

• Prepare 4×4 or 2×4 skids
• Used the crane to lift machine onto skids
• Lag bolt machine down to skids
• Prybar up the skids to put Egyptian tubes under skids
• Roll machine forward to lip of trailer
• Attach come-along to machine to pull it up trailer ramp
• Once machine is on trailer, either use come-along or pvc tubes to maneuver machine into final position in trailer.
• Ratchet strap machine down to trailer.

The Linley being lifted by the gantry crane:

The Linley and the surface grinder were the first to be moved. Here, nick poses for the camera.

The lift actually made things pretty easy, even with the mill which apparently weighs in at around 1200 lbs. It will definitely be a pain on the other end to do everything without the lift… next shop, gantry crane for sure.

Attaching the skids to the base of the mill was pretty challenging- the base of the mill is very thick so we had to find super long lag bolts. One thing I would do differently for next time is pre-cut all the skids the night before, making sure to bevel BOTH ends of the skids so the PVC rollers could easily slide under them.

The mill had ‘tight clearance’

And by tight clearance I mean zero clearance. We moved the trailer a bit until it fit.

Most of load 1!

Load 1 complete. I thought maybe we could get it all in one load, silly boi…

About a mile in, nick stomped on the brakes too hard and the Linley fell over. Luckily, it hit the back of the trailer, and therefore only fell about 45 degrees. We stood it back up and added more straps to tie it down.

The last time the garage floor is visible in its entirety.

Time to unload. Because we were stoopid, we had to do this in the dark, but it went pretty quick, only took an hour or two.

A good system we worked out was to use a 4×4 across the trailer which we effectively used as a capstan. With this, it was pretty easy to smoothly roll the mill down the trailer ramp. We did have to rotate the head to get it in the garage. NBD.

An exhausting day– time to do the whole thing again the next day.

Day 2, I kinda forgot to take pics. But, things went pretty well. The lathe was on a dolley so we kinda just rolled it over to the center of the garage where the gantry crane is, and then lifted it off the dolley. The dolley was small and bad, but we kept it anyways. I also got the shelving unit. The drawers on this guy are removable, so the process for moving it was to take all the stuff out of the drawers, then move it into the truck, then put all the stuff back in the drawers.

All loaded up. Nick got a set of shelves too!

Driving.

Arrival in arlington. Welp.. we got.. a loooot of stuff.

With the move done, it was time to relax over a beer with our many pounds of cast iron. Definitely the most interesting object we found in Saugus resurfaced in this move- any guesses?

Yep, thats right- a PULSEJET! We will fire it up some day at Aarons.

The garage was… FULL. Like 100%, FULL. Definitely many months of cleaning ahead!!!!

With all that moving done, it was time to breathe easy for a bit. But, still a lot of work ahead!!