Help with moving a gunsafe

[mekender]

hold a "neighborhoods strongest man" competition... winner gets $100... final contest is to move the safe to your new house...


on a serious note... how far is it from your house to where the safe is?

getting it drop shipped might be a damn good idea... as for getting the safe into place... why not just haul the pallet into place and then break it out from underneath?

[Denis]

Thanks, all! I knew I could count on you.

First off, Mekender wins the prize for most novel suggestion

I'll try to cover things briefly...

Gandalf - thanks for the photos/links - yes, I can hire all that stuff locally if need be. I can't see the freight pry bar / stevedore / roller pinch bar in the catalogue I have open right now, but no doubt they have such things too.

Aglifter - I don't have photos handy, but I'll try to post some later, provided it's not pouring rain when I get home. I like the idea of putting a hard surface on the pallet.

A friend is looking into getting some willing and muscular Poles for me. I'll see if they think they can do it door-to-door.

As an alternative, I'll negotiate with the German riggers about whether they would come to Brussels (a 6-7 hour drive) and do the necessary at this end too. Their quote for pickup and kerb dropoff was about 2400 euro (x 1.4 for US$), and I hope
the trip to Belgium wouldn't add too much to that. As Rumpshot said, I got the safe for a song, because the cost of moving it is substantial, but I always knew that would be the case. The way I look at it, the moving operation will probably cost
me around 3000 euro. I have paid more than that for a couple of the firearms which will eventually live in the safe, so if it prevents the theft of just one of those, it has paid for itself.

I intend to put the safe on the poured concrete floor of a garage designed for parking cars, so I think it should be solid enough to support the safe. I suppose a damp-proof course of some sort between floor and metal would be a good idea, though...

There are a couple of tricky points:

Tipping: the make and model of the safe isn't apparent (it must be pretty old, but it's fully functional) so I can't easily find out whether it can be tipped without harm to the locking mechanism. I'll have to take my chances on that.

The safe is too tall to go through the garage door upright, because the approach to the door is on a slope; even if the door were removed, the lintel is still too low.

There's not a lot of headroom in the garage. The safe can only be tipped upright somewhere near the door, as the rest of the ceiling is lower (lower than the longest diagonal of the safe). My plan would be to get it upright somehow (!), and roll it into
position on steel rods, pyramids-style, as HTRN and others have suggested.

Unfortunately, the low headroom will be a problem for using an engine hoist, and I don't know that a forklift could operate there, unless there are ones whose boom doesn't stick up very high.

Getting down the slope: this is the bit that worries me most - I believe the professional riggers would use a self-propelling dolly with caterpillar tracks. The DIY version would probably involve turning the safe on its side on the pallet, then sliding the pallet down the slope using a winch attached to the tow-hitch of a big truck. The slope is concrete paving slabs with a pebbled surface.

The German riggers say they would ship the safe standing upright on a pallet. If could get them to ship it lying on its back on a double-wide pallet, it would probably be easier to use a forklift to get it from the kerb into the garage, if the forklift could negotiate the downslope while carring the load. Again, getting it off the pallet and into a standing position would be difficult. Perhaps a forklift with a rotating-fork
attachment would do the trick? Cascade makes those (.pdf file)

I had vague thoughts of welding bolt-on attachment points for a D-shaped "pram-chassis" arrangement to the corners of the safe; construct the "pram" with axles for two pairs of wheels, and using bottle jacks to lift it onto the wheels. The "D"
would also allow tilting the safe while preventing it from falling over. I got the idea from a safe-moving dolly I saw in an industrial supply catalogue, which used two bottle jacks to lift the safe into a wheelable position once it had been slid
onto the carrying surface (photo).

safe dolly.jpg

This safe dolly would be ideal but for (a) getting the safe off the pallet and onto the dolly) and (b) the safe won't fit through the door standing-up...

Anyhow I'll get on the phone tomorrow and try to find a safe-mover in Brussels for a quote, at least.

[gandalf23]

Something I thought of last night. You might use a tow truck to tilt the safe up once it's in the garage. If you can get the safe in there on it's back, you could use the tow truck to winch it upright. The tow truck would stay outside, so shouldn't have any height issues. We've used a tow truck to pull a large 1920s heavy cast iron sewing machine out of a shop and load it up onto the truck. The operator was able to drag it out of the room it was in, around a corner and outside the building, then pick it up and load it up on the truck. If I remember right it cost us a six pack of beer.

[HTRN]

The gizmos you picture are quite common for moving heavy safes, soda machines, etc. They're called "lift and rolls". They're not cheap at almost a grand each..

I don't know where you would rent them.

First is this thing already on a pallet? If not, then it means you have to do the roller method.
Second, find out what kind of lifting capability they have at the location - If there's a way to put it on a truck, you could simply get a HD truck for the day, and then rent either a hi-lo or a forklift to unload it.


HTRN

[Denis]

The gizmos you picture are quite common for moving heavy safes, soda machines, etc. They're called "lift and rolls". They're not cheap at almost a grand each..

I don't know where you would rent them.

That photo is from the catalogue of the local industrial rental place here in Brussels. One of those would be the bee's knees, if the safe weren't too tall to fit in my door upright

The safe is not on a pallet where it is now, but the German riggers say they would ship it to me on one. Unfortunately, it needs to be tipped-up at its origin, to get it into and out of a lift (elevator). After the lift, it's plain sailing - level corridors all the way to a loading dock where a lift-gate truck can onload it.

Gandalf, I'm having trouble visualising the tow-truck method... I'll work on some photos.

[Frankingun]

IIRC, a couple forum members mentioned using golf balls under a safe to move it. Wonder if you could do that inside the garage once it's in? Or is the ceiling to low all around?

[Denis]

IIRC, a couple forum members mentioned using golf balls under a safe to move it. Wonder if you could do that inside the garage once it's in? Or is the ceiling to low all around?

Thanks for the reminder about golfballs. I knew there had to be some practical use for those things...

Actually, I think that getting the safe into the garage and vertical will be more of a problem than putting it into its spot once it's inside and standing up. I wanted to take some photos to illustrate the task, but it poured rain all weekend, and I wasn't going to get the camera wet. Maybe this evening... This reminds me to call the riggers in Germany.

[drice]

Yep, tow truck could probably do everything you need once it's at your home.

The boom and winch could be used to get it off the pallet and tilted on it's side, preferrably on top of whatever dolly concept you end up with. By connecting the winch to the safe once it's on the dolly, it could easily control the roll down the slope to your garage, elliminating the danger in case of a run-away.

If you have any hardpoints in your garage ceiling, the tow operator could attach a roller block up high, run his winch line from the truck, through the roller block, and to the top side of the safe. By winching in, he could upright it.

They use roller blocks to run winch lines around corners to move things they do not have direct access to. Once the safe is down the slope and outside your garage, they could also potentially run a roller block to the far wall inside your garage, run the line from the truck, through the block, and back to the safe, to help you get it from the door all the way inside.

I suspect that the tow guy might enjoy this job, as it would present an unusual challenge.

[Denis]

Hmm - a bit of good news - I just dug out the original quote from the hardcore riggers, and it's a good bit less than I remembered. I'll ring them tomorrow, and see if I can't get them to do an all-in-one pick up and drop off job.

Thanks again for all the ideas.

Drice, now I'll have to go downstairs and see if there's somewhere to attach a strong point to in the ceiling...

[ButchS1066]

I suspect that the tow guy might enjoy this job, as it would present an unusual challenge.

Just saw the other day Speed Channel is promoting a reality series on the interesting things tow truck operators get called on to do. In the commercial they were trying to drag a stubborn section of bridge (smallish, looked like something a team of combat engineers would use) across a frozen stream. It was putting up quite a fight.

Agree with your post though, tow truck guys tend to be fairly accomplished riggers, and I'd suspect one would have little trouble getting the safe down the slope and upright in the garage.