Fun with Forklifts

We ordered a Universal pick-and-place machine. Wound up getting a dual-head one sort of by accident.

We have a dinky electric forklift, and the biggest box in the delivery was supposed to be 5000 pounds. So we rented a huge yellow diesel-powered forklift to unload the shipment.

Well, the truck showed up this morning, and the biggest pallet weighed 7500 pounds, and the yellow forklift couldn't unload it. So we called the forklift company and, in half an hour, they pulled up a huge flatbed with a gigantic green forklift. At this point, we are double-parked on both sides of Otis Street, with the bus stop coned off, basically several capital offenses in San Francisco.

It's weird that a machine that places parts the size of ants has to weigh five tons and comes on 11 pallets.

Oh, this is our new optical inspection machine. It inspected its first PCB assembly in four seconds.

Nice. Almost like Christmas!

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I'm guessing that stuff is staying on the ground floor, or are you going to chop it up so it'll go upstairs? ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

No, I took the pix.

Ground floor, which leaves only a single parking spot, for one small red car.

We're thinking about moving, in a year or so maybe, to a bigger place in a quietier neighborhood. Moving is such fun!

On a sunny day (Mon, 14 Apr 2014 21:41:26 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Cheaper city?

No, just a few blocks south to a less frantic location. Mission, Otis, South Van Ness, as 12th streets collide with a total of 27 lanes of traffic. That's about 25 too many.

On a sunny day (Tue, 15 Apr 2014 07:14:08 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Yes I see it in google maps.. Was wondering if you were about to move to Arizona across from Jim. I would think things are cheaper there..

Heads up when you move. Crowd everybody into their 'final' spaces. Do NOT allow people to spread out to use all the available space.

I made that mistake once. I allowed people to take over all the space, anywhere from 200 sqft each to over 500 sqft each, then as I added people, morale went DOWN!! major setback, everybody perceived demotion as they lost space. So next time, I forced everybody into their 'final' locations with a giant empty space in plain view. Then, as I added people, morale went UP!

Some people's children and sharing. sigh.

Certainly cheaper, out in a desert, with miles and miles of miles and miles. But there's a reason why Google and Square and Twitter and Linear and a zillion other tech companies are in San Francisco and New York and Austin. The kind of people that we need like to live here.

Besides, the air is cleaner here.

Besides, I'd probably run into Jim at IHOP or Applebees or The Olive Garden.

On a sunny day (Tue, 15 Apr 2014 08:28:00 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

I took this picture yesterday late afternoon, from inside:

Yea, likely. ;-)

Geez, I had no idea they were that heavy. Our Philips CSM84 is 5 x 7 feet, and 5' tall, and weighs something like 1700 Lbs. It has 3 heads and can do up to 5000 PPH or so using multiple heads with mechanical alignment jaws. I didn't get the model with vision.

I had to have a double door installed when I knew the machine was coming. That cost me more than the machine+shipping!

Jon

Nice big one!

This is a rainbow over Lake Tahoe, on my birthday in 2010. We stopped at a little general store for snacks and batteries, stepped outside, and saw this:

That's Nevada on the far side.

We missed the lunar eclipse and red moon last night; fogged over. San Francisco gets a lot of fog, especially in our neighborhood, in the Alemany Gap. But it's nice clean fog, and we don't need air conditioning.

More of your damned fool ignorance:

For the really out sized stuff, they just jack up one end of the pallet and shove a wheel set under it.

Good luck pulling a 7500 pound load up the camber of the street with a manual truck. Or stopping it if it decides to go down.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The pallets and machines are easy to move, once they are flat on the floor. The problem was unloading the truck.

My folks had fun unloading this stuff, and are looking forward to setting it up and learning how to run it all.

You are perpetually hostile and negative and crabby. That can't be healthy. Or fun.

It's motorized, Sherlock. And there are these things called *ramps*. Forklifts are deigned for stacking, trucks are used for pulling on the level.

We have a manual pallet jack, and we're getting a couple more, to move this stuff around indoors. One person can move any of those boxes with the jack that we have, except the big one, and we can probably move the 7500 lb monster with two. The pallet must be 10 feet long.

Unloading a truck is a different issue.

We have an ancient wooden Johnson Bar, left by the previous owners. One person can move most anything with that, in small increments.

There are these things, Sherlock :

None of this requires an 80' flatbed transport to the site. When you call the forklift people they're going to rent you a forklift because it's all they know.