I've used various options in the 700-1100 lb tool range, from transporting disassembled tools by van to delivery by commercial truck w/ liftgate, by flat bed with forklift (pro riggers) and delivery by pickup with offloading by the local service station's tow truck. All of them worked with equal success in the end, but the easiest from a worry standpoint was the flat bed and forklift.
Since when? I rented a 24' box truck (International 4300) with Maxon lift gate from Budget with no issues just a few years ago as part of my move, and used it to collect heavy palletized stuff from my various locations and transfer them to the 53' semi for the long haul.
To address your question: Metalworking industry is deaf to hobbyists, as that isn't their main revenue source. Enco, in my opinion, seems randomly and totally deaf from time to time....
My Clausing 5914 (12x36) was delivered via a short-trailer enclosed truck w/liftgate. I purchased it from Plaza Machinery about a year ago, and R+L Carriers was the truck line. As I recall, the truck was selected by Joe at Plaza. As noted by others, any liftgate will be rated for way more
1000 lbs. The main issue with a typical liftgate (and a top-heavy load like a lathe) is the tilt down and away from the truck bed, and the anxiety as you watch the truck driver try to situate the lathe cross-ways on the liftgate with the pallet jack, when the liftgate is barely wide enough to accommodate the lathe crate. In my case, the driver had to leave the pallet jack wheels hanging out in space on the free end of the liftgate. We were able to position the load right in front of my shop bay door (on gravel driveway), and later I was able to lift the lathe after unpacking with the HF shop crane (special version with the high-tensile orange paint:-), and place on shop floor. My HF foldable shop crane handles both my J-hd. Bridgeport and the Clausing (so far) without collapse. The main problem there is having enough room to actually use the crane when required, and I am quite careful with the Bport about sudden shocks while it is being moved suspended on the crane.
Get a couple HF small furniture dollys -- ten bucks a piece on sale -- and transfer some of the weight to them when you try and move a BP with a shop crane. Life gets a lot easier. And move it slowly so that when a wheel catches a rock or something, there isn't enough momentum to make the whole pile go "crash..."
As usual, you guys are great, and I will tear into the entire thread tomorrow.
Interesting. Enco's web site said 2000 lb was the cutoff, which got me reconsidering the 8x36 mill (sorry to jump around between lathe and a future mill - I'm trying to figure out how to do this "safe and smart"). I expected no contest to a lift gate for the lathe, but got precisely that. I will try again though, as I recognized the voice as being associated with what a friend of mine calls "a thousand points of no".
I took a few minutes to call about rentals. Got a really friendly guy who says my best fork lift option would be to let him deliver it (damn thing weighs 10k lb!), one day for just under $400, just under $500 for two days. From the sound of it, one day should work as long as I know the machine is arriving that day. Anyway, that's got to be overkill for a 1000 lb lathe, but perhaps reasonable for a mill. Though at one point I had a local moving company that would receive and redeliver for around $500 IIRC. Probably a winner for a mill, at least so far.
Seems like an awful lot of money for something most of us probably do ourselves. $400 or $500 will buy you a lot of tooling. If you're clever enough to run a lathe, you're clever enough to get the thing off the truck and into your shop.
Find a local farmer with a loader. Roll it off onto cribbing and lower it a block at a time. Slide it down a ramp. Have it delivered to a local terminal and then load it onto a truck or trailer of your own, as the delivery driver probably won't want to stand around all day while you get it off his truck. Just be aware that lathes are topheavy - make sure it is securely bolted to a pallet or timber frame wide enough to keep it from tipping.
Interesting that you can rent a 10,000 pound forklift for a day and have it delivered and picked up for less than the moving company wants just to deliver a 1,000 pound lathe, no?
Not at all- it's just that you're probably not wanting hobbyist machines, and I can understand that. There are plenty of tools geared towards home users that are pretty easy to move around.
I just moved a 3000# or so turret lathe into my basement- and I don't even have a pickup, much less any specialized rigging equipment.
If you ask, I am certain they will deliver the machine to a distribution center where you can pick it up, and if you can get that far, you're in business. The way I handled the monster lathe, with some assistance from the guy I bought it from and another one I work with, was to held up there a couple of days in advance and load the machine onto a flatbed trailer- not a flatbed truck, just a regular pull-behind with stiff enough springs to hold the thing up. We jacked up the tongue, and pulled it onto the trailer with a manual comealong attached to the machine and the tongue of the trailer. (At this point, it should be noted that the machine was already on a wooden sub-base with casters to help move it, but rollers would work as well.) After it was secured and strapped down, we towed it the 70 miles or so to my place a few days later, and hooked the comealong to a tree to pull it off. We just used scrap material to make a temporary ramp and it came off with a little effort and a lot of care.
My basement is at street level, so after that, it was just a matter of pushing it into place.
If it was on a semi, there would have been no way in hell to do it- but with the flatbed trailer, it's not that hard of a job, and you don't even need a pallet jack, much less a forklift.
I'm nervous enough about trying to coordinate a trucking company and a rental service. Leaning on people with other priorities is unlikely to work, even if I knew a farmer. Besides, with our drought conditions, farmers are probably in a really bad mood. Though I suppose that could make them eager to pick up some extra cash.
The terminal idea is a good one. One possibility is to have the lathe delivered to work (aka home of the Gators) and get it into my pickup from there. So far, I know of a scissor lift, but it is on the other end of the hospital from the loading dock. Crossing the building with
1000 lb of cast iron is not a way to make friends, and there would be other logistic problems. If there is a scissor lift at the dock, it might work. Naturally, I would clear it in advance.
A forklift is (or should be) overkill for a lathe. I am also viewing this, to some extent, as a rehearsal for receiving a mill. I handled the mill-drill, but with not too much margin thanks to a sloping driveway and other seemingly small details.
You should be able to unload a 1,000 lbs lathe from a pickup using a "shop crane", a.k.a. "engine hoist". You can make this even easier by removing various parts from the lathe. It is not really a "big deal". You have to be careful and make sure that the center of gravity of the lathe is inside the perimeter of crane legs and everything is properly prevented from moving. As a precaution, I always throw a couple of bags of soil on the back of the crane when lifting heavy stuff on a driveway.
I loaded a Clausing 8530 mill on my pickup using my crane. See
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Observe proper precautions, that is, go slow, do not stand under load, keep things as low as possible, think about what can go wrong, etc.
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I can almost match that with help from UF. Receiving works great. I will investigate their options for getting things into my pickup. So far, I moved a healthy sized compressor and what amounted to a horizontal freezer to my chairman's house for ultimate retrieval by the company that loaned it to us. To get on the truck, we used a lift on the opposite side of the building from our dock, and then muscled the items down from the truck at his house - a lathe would take more thought on the way down.
I'll bite: how do you get stuff out of your pickup w/o breaking it? What is the heaviest item you would put in an F-150? It is surprising to me how many times I've handled 900-1000 lb loads in less than a year that I've owned it. Based on that, I would not expect trouble with the lathe, other than some care to avoid tearing/puncturing the bed liner (or worse yet the bed itself) with a concentrated load. Is it reasonable to expect a palette to provide enough protection?
The sloped driveway will not bother my truck. With it backed up against the garage, I should be able to ramp it down using a come-along. Currently, the bed liner covers the cleat holes, so I would probably want to fix that first. I didn't do it :) I found a 96 F-150 w/ 75k miles, regular cab and manual tranny (both pluses in my book), and only minorly abused - too good of a deal to pass up, even with a brain-dead liner. If my engine hoist can get high enough to lift the lathe off the bed, and w/o hitting the garage ceiling, then so much the better.
If any of that sounds unrealistic, please speak up.
The only trick to what you show is that the tailer would be too long to back up against the garage, meaning there would be a need to cope with some driveway slope, and a small climb into the garage. I do not (yet anyway) have a place to anchor a come-along to pull into the garage.
I'm hearing three times that to receive and re-deliver.
It's not pain so much as I want to be very sure I understand what I am doing. The lathe might simply cause me to buy a beefier work positioner than I had in mind. I found an 800 lb capacity unit that looked attractive, but bigger might be better. Note that I am not thinking of it just for the lathe - I have other uses, but still have time to size it accordingly.
What about the basic approach shown here:
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Would that reduce a larger mill into pickup truck sized pieces? People have reported doing it, I just don't know how crazy it is. I am thinking local moves only. Aside from all of the work involved, tipping the base could be ugly (to put it in the bed). I saw a picture of just that having been done, but can't find it again. Just asking :)
The lathe is 1000 lb, which I should be able to handle, but could use some advice.
The ton is in the back of my mind for next time. I am trying to figure out just how far I am willing to go on a mill. It seems reasonable (to me anyway) to consider both problems as I get close to buying the lathe.
That's just the kind of thing I am hoping to learn. Some questions are:
What are the best options for DIYing a 1000 lb lathe into and out of a pickup? Is it reasonable to do w/o a trailer? I might have to ask some follow up questions because my driveway isn't the friendliest.
How sharp is the 2000 lb cutoff? Would you rig a mill at that weight, or seek help? I am asking because I might decide to alter my shopping list. My position has been to insist on a 12" cross travel, but there are 8x36 mills that weigh under 1700 lb - I like that, especially if I were to remove a component or two. Enco does not sell them, but there are mills that at least are advertised as weighing 2000 lb and having a
12 inch cross travel. If a 2000 lb machine is greatly more manageable to a hobbyist than would be even a 2400 lb machine, I want to know that, likewise if 2000 lb is just a bit too much for DIY.
To those who would suggest a benchtop knee to me, I counter by observing that cross travel is smaller than I have on my mill-drill. I would have to think carefully before taking that hit. An 8x36 with a 9"+ cross travel might be worth a look, especially if I can reasonably expect to be able to rig it myself. If I move a long distance, then selling/re-buying or trucking are the obvious options. But I have always slightly cheated the costs of local moves with some elbow grease. If I give up that option with machines, I want to understand it up front. Also, I can't help but think that a machine might be better off being broken down and moved in pieces by its owner vs. being moved by people who might not have our respect for iron.
I believe you :) However, you are saying that 2-ton crane can't really handle a one-ton load, right? I know mine is good for 700 lb.
Another concern I have is getting a mill out of the way of storm damage or repair of same. Call me paranoid, but I just want think ahead. That should do it, as would the old roller trick. The hoist and dollies sound more to my liking - not sure why.
The bad news is that the mill would hit the most level part of my driveway and end up on its side 10-20 ft past the end of the driveway.
I could not get out of my current home that way (no plans, but one never knows), but it might work on future moves. Thanks!
Upright in the bed? That must have been an interesting drive, or do I not have enough respect for F-250's?
I don't quite get it. Lowered onto the ram of which truck? Did the mill sit on the palette pending arrival of the shipping container? If so, how did that help? At 2800 lb, I would almost certainly hire a rigger, but I'm curious just the same. Similar ideas might be helpful to me on smaller scale.
Understood. Let's just say that I recognized the voice, and will call again. If they understand that the sale is conditional on the answer, it might change things too.
I have just such a crane, which I bought initially to handle my mill, and now can't imagine how I ever got by w/o one :)
Sandbags are a good idea.
Let's see if I'm following. You started out by using the hoist to remove the head. Then I guess you removed the table and knee either w/o the crane or with it and then re-hoisted the head. No accusation - just hoping I'm not missing the obvious. Were there any tricks to load balancing the table and knee? Any tricks to attaching to them?
Did you hoist the base and column? Are there holes for that purpose? I would not expect much trouble clearing a 4" palette. But then you apparently cleared a 3 ft pickup bed. Were there any tricks to that? You appear to even have done it with the palette thrown in there. How did that work?
Then you hoisted the head, table and knee into position on top of the truck. Again I start to wonder about height. Did you have trouble getting the knee over its way? Then you added components and built a box around it. Wood blocks under the knee to help support it are no surprise.
Any concerns about being so far back on the truck bed? Top-heaviness of the box? What did you do to secure it to the bed?
If you don't mind saying, what was the goal, and/or destination? Was the idea to remove it via forklift?
Understood. I did a fairly good job of that with my mill-drill, but found that I was correct to question the guy telling me not to worry about it. Also, the lathe will weigh more than the mill-drill, so some extra planning won't hurt.
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