-TRANSPORTIN )-TON LOADS.
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Interesting Details of Two Remarkably Diff Vehicles. One was the Moving of a Comph s Performed Successfully Recently by Motor the Other, of a Strong-room Door Frame.
"N OUR busy industrial towns the transport through the streets of such heavy articles as . boilers, electrical converters and other equipment Connected with the large engineering shops and power-generating plants is quite a common sight. Most of the power units used for the purpose are steam tractors, whilst the actual articles are carried on immensely strong trolleys, usually having eight wheels ; but, in spite of what has been achieved in the conveying of such loads, it is doubtful whether two such spectacular and impressive tasks have been accomplished as those which form the subjects of our illustrations, and the scenes of action of which were staged in America.
From the point of view of appearances only, perhaps the more novel of the tasks was that of conveying a complete nine-roomed house, weighing 93 tons, from one site in Los Angeles to another. The house in question was complete with roof, porches, windows and the usual plumbing fixtures, and, in spite of the unwieldy nature and the extreme weight of the load, it was hauled direct by a Mack lorry.
It will be noted that this lorry was heavily laden with blocks of timber, jacks, etc., which were employed in the lifting of the house from its former site and for lowering it into its fresh position. This load assisted in giving the rear wheels -of the lorry the necessary grip on the road surface.
The trailer used for carrying the hoase was ,one specially built for the job, and somewhat resembling that dealt with in a.fully descriptive and illustrated article entitled, "Moving a Village by Motor Larry," published in our issue of November 21st, 1922.
No blocks and tackle or other gear-reducing devices were utilized between the .lorry and its trailer, and it says a lot for the pulling power of the Mack vehicle that it was able even to get such a load into motion at all, quite apart from towing it for some
distance. .
The moving was done under contract by the Los Angeles House Moving Co., a name which seems to suggest that the moving of complete houses i,; quite common in this well-known Californian city. The other two illustrations show how a massive steel door frame, part of a safe deposit vault for a local bank in Cleveland, Ohio, was transported. This frame was 13 ft. square and weighed nearly 100.tans. It was made at York, Pa., from Where it was brought to the railway yard at Cleveland in a special railway truck. It took eight hours' hard work to dismount the huge structure from • its truck, and then the contractors, Norris
• Brothers Co., a local firm, were faced with the extremely difficult problem of transporting the frame from the railway yard to the bank building; a distance of two miles. The contractors were so afraid that the resultant heavy stress on the city -streets might damage the water, gas and sewage systems that they solicited the help of the Engineering
Department of Cleveland, and, fortunately for them, this was willingly given.
T h e vehicles employed on the work were two five-ton lorries of White make. The steel frame, the actual weight of which was 200,900 lb., was supported in a somewhat novel fashion. It would have been very difficult to have lifted it sufficiently high to rest on the platform of a single trailer and, apart from this, few trailers could stand such a concentrated load. In order, therefore, to spread the load more evenly and over as many wheels as possible, two trailers were employed. These were put end. to end with the door frame between them. The frame was then lifted by jacks, huge longitudinal beams resting on crossbeams passed through its centre, and wood packing-blocks arranged in criss-cross fashion above these until they reached the upper portion of the opening for the door. The frame was then lowered until it rested on the wood blocks.
The actual trailers used were each originally intended for conveying 10-ton loads, and, in order to render them capable of a 500 per cent, increase in their load-carrying capacity, that end of each trailer which was nearer to the frame was, in turn, supported by heavy bogie truck haying two pairs of steel wheels, each wheel .having a tyre width of 12 ins.
. -In order to give better adhesion to the wheels of the towing lorries each vehicle was heavily laden, but the deadweight proved rather too much, and it was eventually decided to utilize the street manholes which, fortunately for the contractors, occurred along the route at regular intervals. The use of manholes as a means for facilitating transport by road certainlyappears to be a very unusual piece dure„ but in this case it proved invaluable. To. effect the • operation, one lorry was hitched to the leading. trailer, and the other used as a temporary fixture. For this purpose it was equipped with a powerful, mechanically. operated windlass, the steel cable from which was fastened to the front of the lorry connected to the trailer. Into a convenient manhole was inserted a heavy timber frame with a cross-piece, which prevented the chain used for anchoring the windlass lorry, from lilting much above the street level owing to the angle which the timber frame assumed under load. Large wooden wedges or chocks were also placed behind the road wheels to assist in keeping the vehicle rigid,. The lorry hitched to the trailer assisted in steering the load and also contributed its quota to. the total hauling power. After the windlass had drawn in its rope to the fullest extent, the leading vehicle was disconnected from its anchorage and driven forward to the next manhole, where the cycle of operations was repeated. • In order to prevent damage to the roads, steel plates were laid down as a track for the trailer and bogie wheels on the weakett parts