Barn progress...

Barn progress...  I installed about half the lights in the garage section of the barn yesterday (6 of 11); I should be able to finish the rest of those today.  While I was doing that wiring, a building supply delivery truck showed up, bringing the wallboard and “mud” for my future office on the second floor of the barn.  The builder will be here early next week to actually do the work.

The truck had a particularly long boom crane on it, designed to allow the delivery of heavy construction products up to five stories high, or 45' away from the truck horizontally.  The photo at right (click to embiggen) shows the crane partially extended to deliver our wallboard.  The crane operator used a belt-mounted remote control.  This let him stand right where he wanted it to go, and then guide it in very precisely.  The two guys on the truck humped all that wallboard up my stairs to the second floor.  They were wishing I had bigger windows so that they could have used the crane :)

Later in the day, a Fedex freight truck showed up with a 494 pound pallet full of my new Grizzly dust collection system.  Naturally it's a giant kit, with hundreds of parts.  I unpacked it all (see photo at left) to make sure nothing was damaged in shipping.  That thing is built like the proverbial tank – if any damage occurred, I'm certain it was on whatever the box hit, not on the dust collection system itself!  The system is far larger than I was imagining.  Assembling is going to pose some interesting challenges for this one-man operation.  The motor/impeller assembly weighs about 180 pounds, and it needs to be hoisted to the top of a six or seven foot high device – I'm going to have to get some local muscle to help, or come up with some sort of hoist.  One possibility: I can drive my tractor into the workshop, so I may be able to lift the assembly with the loader.  Or I could mount a block to the roof, then pull it up with the tractor.  What fun!