16 Nov Better Lathe Than Never
Yesterday, the entire staff of Fluid MotorUnion stopped working for 20 minutes or so. Did we start following the French workday? No. We just had to move a very large, unwieldy piece of equipment.
Monday afternoon, a very large flatbed arrived, with a very mysterious tarp. Some of us weren’t too sure what is was, but once the cover had been lifted, most of us pegged the mystery item immediately. It was a lathe for our fabrication garage.
The general idea behind a lathe is that it takes a piece of raw material (wood, metal, etc.) and rotates it, often very quickly. This rotation allows the user to take the raw material and create an item that has symmetry around an axis of rotation, like an ornate design on a table leg or small, metallic chess pieces. Think of it as a pottery wheel, just sideways and capable of removing limbs if improperly used. Anyways, this particular lathe is an older, manual model; despite its age, a lathe will always work as intended (provided the machinery is in good shape, and ours definitely is) and always carries value. Even though, to your humble narrator, the value lies in the controls, the design of which looks as if it was taken from a Soviet spacecraft.
Getting the lathe off the truck was not the easiest task we’d been given all week. As mentioned earlier, it took the entire staff (and the truck driver) to actually get the thing off the flatbed and onto the ground. We only have one forklift, and most of our machinery is smaller and lighter than the lathe, so it took some additional planning before deciding how to go about dealing with this. It took a great amount of effort to get the lathe from the middle of the flatbed (where the forklift couldn’t get a good grasp on it) to the edge, but that was probably the least harrowing part of the entire ordeal.
To grab the lathe with the forklift, we had to raise the forks as high as they could go; this put the lathe well above the center of gravity of the forklift-lathe system, exposing Craig (our fearless forklift master) and everyone involved to a serious tipping risk. So, instead of moving away from the flatbed, the truck driver agreed to roll the flatbed out from underneath the lathe, so we could then lower it (and, consequently, the center of gravity) to a much more acceptable position without adding the risk of moving the forklift itself. It took probably five employees standing on the back of the forklift for us to not worry about the tipping issue, but watching that flatbed roll away was certainly Fear-Sweat City. Thankfully, everything went off without a hitch, and we hauled the lathe into the fabrication garage for its placement.
With no injuries reported, we breathed a collective sigh of relief and returned to our duties. But not before checking out the seriously sweet cab that brought the forklift here. Much like the Mini Cooper from last week, this truck’s sleeper cab was decked out in bright red paint with shiny bits of chrome all over, without a blemish or dull spot to be seen.
On top of that, it had some serious fitment going on. Look at that tire tuck! Somebody should call Burroughs and get a StanceWorks feature on this. But first, it could probably use some spacers.
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