Day 183 1/5/25 Take engine home.

Engine

Take engine from the boat and move to home garage.

Easy to say, hard to do.

Water level in the lake now is 40ft below normal level. And total height drop between parking lot and docks about 70-80ft. 

Marina has no lift, ramp or crane to move something more than 200 lb up way. Only way is very long stairs with 140 steps.

 

View form the parking lot...

 

 Staircase we climbed up. Yes, you can see the lift, but it is only 200lb capacity and no way to use.

Picture was made on the middle of the process.

Based on engine spec it has to weight 400 lb. It is a lot but should be more or less bearable weight for 3-4 people.

Challenge was accepted, but looks like it is heavy enough to do a problem ;-)

Moving from boat to dock was very easy, just hook chain hoist to boom lift it  and swing boom to the dock. put on a dolly and roll it to staircase.

After an hour of planning we (My son and I) decided to use blocks and ropes to slide it up. We mounted engine on the plywood sheet and put 2x4 boards on stairs and slide it up on them. 

Our tackle  - 100ft of 1/4" dyneema and two dual blocks with 100 ft polyester rope. Dyneema- used to extend point of "anchoring" because only thing to tie on the staircase was hand rail posts on one side, block pull not only ahead, but also side way. To fix this issue with side force we "anchored" as far as possible. Blocks tackle  gave us 4:1 advantage and 25 ft. move at one tackle setup.

Sure, we had one more "safety line" to prevent disaster in case if main tackle fail. (Fortunately it was just spare).

Easy to say, a lot of stairs walking up with engine "on hands". My son (he younger than me ;) and he is 21) walked about 1200 stairs steps up and the same amount down during whole process.

Now about the process.

Boards we used 8 ft = 7 steps at time. So, we had to move boards every 7 steps. So we did moved in 20 cycles. Each cycle required  30-40 steps down and up to pull rope and resetting safety line and moving boards. 

Blocks had to be re-setup every 25ft of way or every 3 boards resets. At least 7 times.

When top block coming closer to "anchor"  we reset anchor higher upstairs.  To setup anchor line we need to go almost half staircase up and reset it (~60 stairs up, then down) and we did re-setup it 4 times.

 

Almost upstairs.

 

After 5 hours hard work we get it up. Last hour we had two more people help us to run 10 steps where was no way to use blocks and we had to lift engine step by step. Great thanks to Vitaliy and Oksana for the help. Without them mission could not be executed.

Loading to the track bed was not easy, and very risky. We put boars and roll dolly on 2x6 boards up to the truck. 

Hard work is done. Engine loaded and ready to go.

Saturday was busy too. I had to unload engine and bring it to garage.

First I thought to buy engine lift like this.

 

But it is not cheap and I need it 2 times only, so I built simplified wood version of this.

My hoist bridge and engine at home.