Setting and Moving Shop and Yard Equipment

Where Does the Sling Actually Go

The first question on any machine is where you pick it from. A well made machine has lifting eyes built into the frame and a plate telling you what it weighs. Plenty of machines have neither. What they have is a painted sheet metal skin wrapped around a heavy cast base, and the heavy part is nowhere near the middle of the footprint.

When there are no lifting points, we work from the structure and ignore the body. That usually means slings or forks under the base rails, a spreader bar to keep the straps from crushing the sides, and a test lift of an inch or so to see which way the machine wants to lean before it goes anywhere. A lathe hangs nose down if you guess. So nobody guesses. You lift slightly, watch it settle, set it back, move the rigging, and lift again until it hangs the way you want it.

Skins, Panels and the Route It Has to Travel

Control panels, glass doors, gauges and painted metal are the parts that get damaged on an equipment move, and not one of them is carrying load. Straps get padded or run through corner protection, and anything that sticks out and can be unbolted gets removed and boxed rather than trusted to survive the trip.

Then you measure the route, all of it. Doorway width is the number people bring to the phone call, and it is almost never the number that decides the job. What decides it is the diagonal of the machine against the diagonal of the opening, the header height, the swing of the door leaf itself, the turn at the end of the corridor, and whether the floor between here and there will carry a concentrated load on a skate.

• Overall length, width and height with everything still attached
• Diagonal dimension, which is what really fits through an opening
• Center of gravity, or at minimum which end is the heavy end
• Header height, door leaf swing and corridor turns
• Floor, dock or mezzanine capacity along the whole route

Mezzanines, Raised Pads and Short Moves

Getting a machine up onto a mezzanine or a raised pad is a crane job because a forklift cannot reach the elevation and a pallet jack cannot get there at all. The pick itself is short and undramatic. The planning is about which side the boom can come in from, whether a roll-up door or a removable panel gives access at level, and how the machine gets landed and skated to its final spot once it is up there.

The other common call is the short move that is not a move at all. A compressor lifted off its pad so the slab underneath can be repaired. A tank picked and parked in the yard for a week. A boat picked off its trailer so the frame or the axles can be worked on, then set back when the work is done. These are minutes of actual lifting and mostly a question of having a sensible place to set the thing down while the work happens.

Moving equipment around inside a yard falls in the same category. Rows are tight, aisles were laid out for delivery trucks and not for a boom, and the shortest looking route is frequently the one that cannot be used at all.