Closet Extremist

I HATE concrete guys

I know, I know. Hate is a strong word, but there it is. You see, an elevator shaft is supposed to have a 1/2 an inch tolerance all the way up the hoistway. The way I figure it, that's a lot of room for error when you're trying to keep something "Plumb", but aparrently not. One side wall "stair stepped" out from the wall as it went down, and the other side was "waving" at us at it went up. That 1/2 inch turned into more than an inch and a half on one side, and around four inches on the other! Do these people have no pride in workmanship, or can they just not read the plans? Hellifino, but they sure made my life miserable yesterday. We Got 'er Done nonetheless. It only took an additional eight hours from what we'd initially planned on, but it's done.

Did I mention that it was absolutely essential that we get the rails up on this job? Didn't think so. This paticular elevator is hydraulic, but it's of kind of an interesting configuration. There's only one piston for it. It attaches to the bottom of the platform right in the middle, and pushes up from below. The problem is that there has to be a hole dug down pelow the bottom of the pit (as deep as the rise of the piston) to accommodate this one large hydraulic "jack". In order to drill the hole, the drilling contractor needs to have to rails to mount his drill to, and he should be there as I type this. Absolutely no choice in the matter, had to be done so that the guy's can auger the hole. (There have already been a couple of delays due to the driller, so we are up against our time frame pretty bad.)

While my "Lead" and I were waiting to get the rails in for the freight elevator, we went ahead and stacked the rails for a passenger car that we alrady had the parts for. Here's the shaft of that one looking up.

(You can click to enlarge any picture I post)

Nice, straight, purty, "Omega" rails, just waiting for them to drill the hole for the "jack" for this one. Speaking of which:

The big black thing that's laying against the back wall behind the ladder is the Jack. It's about 28 feet long and weighs in at a cool 900 pounds. That is the small one on this job. Speaking of the job, we are installing these elevators in the Hunter Museum of American Art. If you look at the renderings on that site, it pretty much shows you a bright and modern architecture, but the original building couldn't have been farther from what you see on their site. Witness this:

As you can plainly see, they are adding all this ultra modern stuff onto each side of a freakin' mansion. I'm sure that the architect on this project thought that he was doing something pretty special by upgrading the look of the original house, but I think that he's ruined this building. I'd rather have seen the design go in as an extension of the original building, and not as such a departure from it. Don't get me wrong though, I'll still take the money from the job.

Posted by Johnny - Oh at November 6, 2004 05:33 PM