About 1932
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About 1932
Huw, like your new portrait - not so stern.
These safes along with similar weight Chubb Specials came in and went out on Glasgow Hiring Co. low loaders on to concrete floors so no great problems but using 10 ton toe-jacks in place of the usual pinch bars.
Some time ago I seem to remember you wrote of moving extremely heavy safes with just pinch bars, a heel (fulcrum) and solid rollers. As some onlookers used to observe when these heavies were being moved "that's how they built the pyramids". More bodies of course then.
I have an old photo (1957) showing how it was before Hiab and Tail Lifts just getting a safe on to a lorry. The winch-man is barely visible.
Attachment 20201 Attachment 20202To paraphrase Archimedes - "give me a fulcrum for my lever and I will move the world".
It looks like they picked the wagon with the highest bed possible 8-) . I still move some of mine like that, although with a steel ramp with roller bearings welded on the sides.
Give me a lever long enough, and something to rest it on and I shall bend the lever!
[QUOTE=Huw Eastwood;29820]Snap, I'm glad you said that Gary as that was our only way of ever doing it!
Scoff as you may at our two battens (apparently they’re known as deals in the South) but at least there was never any danger of the safe slipping far back down on the wood if the winch ratchet or wire rope were to malfunction. Steel on steel sounds pretty dodgy to me on the slope.
Tom, there was never a third batten. The small section between the battens was to stop the safe from grounding on the road as it was tipped off the pallet on to the battens.
Anybody, as a matter of interest, how, to your knowledge were safes handled up flight of stairs, straight or curled, cantilevered or otherwise, before the current prohibitive legislation?
There was no scoffing from me safeman, what I meant was I was relieved that Gary admitted he still uses that old school method as that was our way of doing it as well, for about another 50 years after your photo...
If before stairclimbers, lighter ones physically manhandled strapped to a sackcart, heavier ones winched up on boards or cribbed up.