15. Moving a 6 Ton Generator, a Lesson in Physics!: East Africa a New Life Adventure

On arriving back at the College after our wonderful Christmas, a new challenge was presented to me.  Dr. Kariro had sold the school generator to a school up north, and he asked if I could remove it from the house that had been built around it.  He offered as many workmen as I thought I needed to accomplish the task. Now it was customary in the Kenya HighLands to group as many men as possible around a heavy object and lift it with brute force.  That was not going to happen with an object which weighed 6 tons or so.  I told Dr. Kariro that I would not work on a project like that with workmen who could not understand me and might not respond to my commands quickly enough to avoid serious injury or death. I would have to analyze the situation and do some planning to see if the generator would fit through the door, and then using my 8 year old son we might get it done.  

First of all the generator had to be lifted off the bolts that held it down and put on 4x6 skids, then slid sideways about four feet, and finally lowered to floor level before starting to get it out the door. The work began, by lifting the generator with the three ton hydraulic jack that had come in our sea freight box mentioned before. By lifting each end separately and stabilizing each lift carefully with cribbing, Milt and I got the skids in place and secured. The next task was to build the cribbing up from the floor level so that the generator could be pushed sideways in line with the doorway. This was accomplished by using the hydraulic jack laying on its side, then lowering it to the floor using the reverse technique as used to raise the generator.  Using the cribbing again to build a stable ramp out the door to ground level, we managed to  get the generator out of the building by using the crawler tractor we had recently repaired. 

The school that had bought the generator sent their trucker to pick it up. I had the driver back his truck up to a bank of dirt that was level with the truck bed, then using the crawler I drug the generator about 20 yards to where I could push it onto the truck bed. My job was done, but to my horror, the trucker had no chains or tighteners to secure the generator, and they were prepared to head off over 30 to 40 mile with the generator setting loose. I asked Dr Kariro if I was supposed to go with them to help them unload. He said absolutely not! It was the buyer’s machine now and the buyer’s responsibility. I found out 25 years later that the generator had fallen off the truck and broke the flywheel, but I do not know if the damage was done during transit or during unloading.