Machine roller

Contemplating purchase of a pallet jack to move my Monarch 10EE around the my garage once the truckers figure out how to unload it from their truck (their lift gate capacity not adequate inspite of me telling them to consider the weight of the lathe before accepting the transport deal, now they are stuck). I would rather buy a used one if someone has one since it will be rarely used. Or I could weld a mover such as this as discussed in the forum sometime back but the info is inadequate:

I made a pair of hydraulic lifters that can lift up to 8,000 lbs and can roll the mill anywhere you want on a flat floor. They only cost as much as some steel tubing, 4 solid steel 5 inch casters and 2 hydraulic bottle jacks in the 6 ton range. I planned on writing them up for the webmetal news with pictures. I needed them to extract a mill and lathe from under a house in Oakland CA. They took about 4 hours to make and worked like a charm. I don't know if anybody ever made these for sale, but back when I was an apprentice machinist at Purdue University's central machine shop, the bull gang used something similar to move half the machine tools over one weekend. I tried to remeber what they looked like 15 years ago and came up with a really neat moving tool. Basicly they consist of a steel frame about 2'x3' with an angle iron foot on the 2' side. The frame slides up and down on another frame with 2 solid steel swivel casters, and a 6 tone bottle jack. The angle iron is slid under the edge of the machine, and when the bottle jack is pumped it lifts the frame off the ground. One of these lifters is placed on each end of the machine tool. A webbing ratchet strap is used to strap them together. Once you pump each end up an inch or so the machine just rolls around as easy as can be. It is important that the frames remain vertical or it will roll rather odd. I used them to roll 2 machines of about 1 ton each out from under a house, across a back yard, up a driveway and onto the lift gate of a flat bed truck. I'll try to get the article together for the web page. Hopefully sometime next month.

-- Best of luck

********************************************************************* Ernie Leimkuhler STAGESMITH PRODUCTIONS Custom Metal Fabrication ABANA AWS SCA IATSE Local 15/488 Renton, Washington, USA

Any ideas about or similar to this? A simple and easy design would be great! How about some input on ways to move my machine around the shop?

trg-s338

Reply to
trg-s338
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a big pry bar, and sundry pieces of 2 inch gi water pipe used as rollers......how many times in your life are you planning to move the thing?

Andrew VK3BFA.

Reply to
Andrew VK3BFA

Actually, you want to use the smallest pipe you can get. I used some

3/4" black iron pipe to move my 3500 Lb Sheldon 15" lathe. If I had used 2" pipe, I would have had a catastrophe, as I managed to run one corner of the lathe off the pipe. Since the pipe was so small, the lathe did not tip past the balance point, although it scared the HELL out of me that it might.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

What ernie was talking about were building toe jacks for lifting machinery. There are a couple of systems out there for pro machinery movers- skates, jacks, and so on. The main US company is Hilman-

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more sophisticated, however, are the GKS skates and jacks, from europe.
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Not worth buying unless you move a lot of stuff, but if you do, they beat the pants off pieces of pipe.

Guys who routinely move $40,000 to $300,000 CNC machines, where a screwup can be expensive, use stuff like this.

Reply to
Ries

Actually, besides moving the lathe into the garage, I am also planning the logistics for my one year moving plan to Colorado which will of course involve moving the machines about and loading onto a transport. I realize I will likely have to rent a forklift for the loading and unloading of my lathe, shaper and mill. As one can imagine, there may be occasion to set the machines down temporarily and then relocated to their final positions. It would be nice to have a moving devise handy. Thanks for the input.

Reply to
trg-s338

Thanks for the links, I can believe I now have an idea of what Ernie meant. I may just plan and build something along the lines of those minatlanticlift toe jacks.

Reply to
trg-s338

Actually this is what I made for myself.

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Pretty easy to build. If I was to make another set I would get casters that could be locked at

90 degree intervals.

It would make the load easier to handle on grades.

Reply to
Ernie Leimkuhler

Thanks for the link and your response.

Reply to
trg-s338

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