We’ve bought a lot of stuff over the years and most of the trailers, containers, and tractor equipment is stored along the road at the garden. This lineup of equipment has gotten so long that Lucy has started referring to it as “Junk Yard Alley” (and I was so proud of all my stuff!).
Well, I’ve been talking about storage for years now so when my friends Eric and France came back from Ottawa Argo, saying they had bought a tent, but not the big demo tent that was on sale, I was very interested.
I’d bought the hydraulic dumping farm trailer from Glenn at Ottawa Argo a few years back and I know he had really good quality, inexpensive equipment there. I gave him a call and yup the 30 x 40 foot shelter was for sale. It was an older model and he wanted it down and gone so he could put up a new one. The new ones were going for $8K and he would sell this 2 year old model for $3K. SOLD! I said, all I had to do was take it down and move it out of there.
I figured I could get it all in the 6x10 foot trailer so Josh and I headed out on Saturday to take it down and haul it away. I didn’t think we would get it finished but I was hopeful. The tarp itself going over the structure wasn’t hard to get down but before we could do that, we had to unlace the front door and back panel as well as all along the bottom. This was all tied up with long green ropes woven back and forth through the hundreds of grommets. Yep, a couple of hours into it and we were still untying the damm thing.
We had arrived mid morning and by 3 PM we had all the tarps off, rolled up and in the back of the trailer. We still had about 4 hours of light but we were tired and it seemed like a good time to call it a day, so off we went with the tarps. I would be back tomorrow to finish the job.
I was back Sunday by 10 AM. It’s a hour drive from Lone Wolf and it’s below freezing in the morning so I wasn’t in a hurry to get there early. Josh couldn’t make it so I was working alone. I had two ladders but neither was long enough to get to the top of the structure so I had made arrangements to have the long shop ladder left out. Yep, the shop is closed Sunday and there was no ladder. I called Glenn at home and he came out to get me set up.
Now the structure is a series of arches held to each other by 5 cross beams, the highest dead center on the top. Alone on the ladder, I climbed up about 20 feet and removed the center beams, then the outer right ones, then the outer left. By the time I got to the outer left beams the arch would sway about 6 inches whenever I unbolted the cross support. It reminded me of rock climbing for some insane reason.
After a couple of hours the top three braces were done and I could thankfully put away the tall ladder. After that I started at the back and unbolted the arches from the base plates, removed the side beams and lowered the arch to the ground.
Lowering the arches took some thinking. I through a rope over the second last arch and tied a rope around the last arch and got it up to the top. The other end of the rope was tied off to the structure at the front. With the braces off I lifted the arch out of the base plates and pushed it outwards. It fell until the rope caught it and I then lowered the arch to the ground, disassembled it and put it in the trailer. Had I been really smart, I would have tied all the arch sections together. I continued this process until the last two arches at the front. Using the rope and the truck bumper I tied off the last two arches, released the second last arch so it fell towards the front arch and then released the front arch so they both fell away from the truck, and hung in midair. I backed up the truck until they landed on the ground. Now all the arches were down. Oh, did I mention that this took two days to do???
The last thing was to get the base plates out of the ground and I was done. The baseplates were secured by rebar into the ground, with a little cement and all I would need is a prybar to get them out. Well they wouldn’t budge with a prybar and Matt, who was running the shop, drove over a tractor with a backhoe on it. We he managed to get the back wheels of the tractor up in the air without making a dent in the hardpacked ground. I went home and left it up to Matt and Glenn to figure out what to do next.
A couple of days later I get a call from Glenn, the plates are out. They used an excavator to dig them up. I drove back in the van, no trailer. I figured a hour at the most to load them up and I would be done. When I got there I found the baseplates out of the ground but attached to huge chunks of concrete. I had brought a sledge hammer but after a few wacks I knew it would be impossible to bust the concrete enough to free the rebar and get the plates off. After much discussions, I got the use of a tractor and grinder and I loaded each concrete and plate pillar into the tractor bucket, drove it to the shop and cut off the rebar tops freeing the plates. After a couple of hours I was getting good at this and by early afternoon I was done. I figures it took me 16 hours to get that tent down and packed away.
The Big Tent – Putting it Up
I had sent out a general email to my friends, a Barn Raising and Target Shooting party and six hardy souls showed up Saturday ready to raise a barn, and a little hell afterwards.
I had staked out the perimeter and sorted all the pieces. Instead of laying out the base plates, rebaring them into the ground and then inserting the arches, the plan was to build it free floating and later to crank in the arches, then need to come in about 8 inches under tension, and rebar them in place. The first step was to build the front and back arches. Soon enough people arrived and Paul Gulyas and Mic were piecing together the back arch while Paul Martin and Glenn were putting together the front. Heather, Karen and Pam were helping and offering encouragement until Lucy arrived with cookies for the boys. A bit later my Dad, Sam, arrived to help out and act as general supervisor (when I was a young lad I had helped when he raised his steel barn).
Lucy then whisked the girls off to the cabin for cheese and champagne, but before they went they helped raise the two back arches. With lots of people holding we got them tied together and stable. Next we needed to put the cross beams in place and Paul Gulyas was almost all the way up the big ladder when someone had the great idea to use the tractor, so over I came with Zac, and with Paul and Mic in the bucket I raised them up and they bolted the arches together.
The rest went really quickly with the guys putting the middle arches together and raising them and then Paul and Mic bolting them together.
Thing were going really well until we got to the front section and the bucket wouldn’t raise. I had broken the chain linkage from the engine to the hydraulics. No more Zac for the day. Paul Gulyas went up the big ladder and bolted the last section into place.
It was a bit crooked (okay, really crooked), with the front right arch baseplate completely in the air, and there was much discussion about leveling the ground, etc but we were done for the day. Time to go target shooting? Nah, another day, time to go back to the house, drink beer and tell stories. We put the lasagna on, as the girls were still at the cabin, but they were back soon enough, for a great dinner and tall tales about raining a born.
Post Script
The next day I went back and measured the diagonals. The structures was 3 feet out of square. Using a rope and the truck I dragged one side back and then pulled the center forward until it was lined up within 3 centimeters. All the feet are on the ground and it looks good. Last night I cut a bunch of rebar into 3 foot lengths. Next I’ll use the come along to pull the arches into place and rebar the plates securely into the ground. After that it will be put the covers on and we’ll be done, just in time for winter.