This is a big deal since we live off grid...and since we don't have the luxury of power coming out of a hole in the wall (unless we put it there) we spend a good bit of time harassing it out of a steel machine that roars in our yard....and this one's a beaut...3.5k Lister, good old fashioned hand crank starter, very dreamy...
We'd bundled up and made the one hour boat trip to the nearest town, Gustavus. Adam needed to mail off a knife to a client in Switzerland and we had to figure some way to bring the 400lb diesel home with us.
It required some ancient Egyptian technology (makeshift rollers) to move it out from under the pile of old treasures our benefactress had in her shop. Lucky for us our sometimes, summer neighbor Johnny (of Johnny's Seasonings) was running his landing craft over to our shores the next morning and was generous enough to transport it for us. Then it was only a dock crane away from the back of the truck. It took Adam and our local Gen-set Guru about an hour to fire the beast up after it having sat for 25 years...gotta love those Listers!
It took another day to clear the trees and stumps for the new shed site. We shoveled gravel from the beach about 3 miles away into our ATV cart and then drove it back up the trail to resurface the chosen spot.
Having rummage through our ever dwindling lumber supply we decided the abandoned shed at the old harbor looked like a fabulous generator shed...just needed a relocation. After the usual trailer woes of swapping ball sizes to match bent hitches... anyone who puts a ball hitch on without Never-Seize is a sadistic fiend AHEM...we got it all set with the forklift...
...and off we went at a crawl speed up the rocky trail. Since the road to our house has never accomodated anything of this size before we had to chainsaw and knifehack the trailside trees into submission. Our shed roof did a little pruning of it's own as we drug it through the overhanging branches.
It was all going swimmingly until a stubborn stump caught a tire and snapped the trailer tongue in half, sideways. By now it was getting dark out and we had completely clogged off the trail with our 'clampet-mobile' sans granny and her rocker.
So we hightailed it home for our headlamps and welder...
...handily we already had a diesel generator in the back of our truck (who knew?) and with a genuine 'GIT-ER-DONE' wiring job to match the two together we were back at the scene of the carnage with the proper weapons in hand. I cranked over the beast while Adam donned his welding hood...the dogs, unimpressed by our midnight adventures went home and fell asleep on the porch.
We mended the tongue and towed the contraption to a wide spot in the road. The shed was beginning to fall off the stern of our trailer and it was black dark so we gave it up for the night, waiting to wend our way through the shed shredding woods in the daylight. Come morn, with the help of a good friend Chuck, and his chainsaw, we got it through the last half mile of rocky, muddy jeep trail. Once in the driveway it was a matter of a couple bottle jacks, a few more hours of brute force and ingorance and we had it settled nicely on blocks in our shop yard. With a bit of salvage and some remodeling we cobbled together a bench to mount 'Genny' on.
Now then...how do you move a 400lb diesel from the back of a truck, into a shed and up onto a bench? With lot's of grit, spit, 2 bladesmiths, a P-vee, a come-along, and plenty of properly applied peer pressure she slid in as easy as a hailbut slides off the hatch.
So there she rests. We're on our way to Juneau town in the big boat as I write this and there we'll find the electrical panels we need to have a fust rate diesel generatuh and powah comp'ny yussir.
