"baggin" the garbage

[TowZone]

Topic Originally created in March of 2008:

 

Received a call the other day from Mike @ Oakwood Service in Auburn for activation of our air cushion emergency response trailer/team

so we "stole" Ron's p/u and hooked up the trailer and headed out on a road trip to somewhere that I still don't know where (and I was driving),but it was a nice long drive

After having Glenn crunch some numbers, we came up with a initial calculation of 8.5 to 9 psi across four (4) jumbo cushions. Not wanting to drag another jumbo across the ditch, and being a sturdy trailer, we decided to lift with four.

Glens calculations where right on the coin, as we where at 8 1/2 psi on the initial lift. It stayed pretty heavy to full inflation

Glen operated the controls
Matt along with mikes Crew @ Oakwood assisted in dragging the equipment into position and placing the cushions under the trailer

as usual....I did nothing of substance but get in the way/lay on the ground and pretend to be doing something important...lol (but I did help clean up)

anyways, after we lifted up with the cushions, mike's crew/wreckers with glen giving them a hand, finished up-righting and moved the casualty to the road surface

Matt and I packed up the cushions

All in all was a great team effort and what I would consider a flawless bag job, and tks for mike and his crew to invite us down to his playground and play with some cushions for a bit

 

 

 

 

glen working the control bank

 

 

 

thats me laying on the ground (and you thought I was kidding)

 

theres mike @ oakwood playing with the placing pole, and matt keeping my spot warm

 

 

 

hopefully you can see the four gauges with the load on them
maybe you can see another little trick here also???????

 

I called mike to let him know that I posted this, hopefully he can chime in and fill in the names of the

rest of his crew that where there other then his dad, as my memory isn't as good as it used to be

 

 

Ed Barker said:

I see your little trick Scooby,,,your gauges and hoses are color coded,I been meaning to do that

to ours and never remember until we are on a job,,looking good Scooby. Take care, Ed

 

danielswt said:

very nice.i was wondering if you were gunna post this job after talking to you Saturday.

do you keep them color coated all the time or redo the colors on every job?

 

Scooby said:

ya like that ed??...lol

yep dan that's the job. I have been lax in posting jobs, as just way too busy the last 6 months. With the start of the "nice" season, I'll be busy again.

anyways, for many years I/we have fooled around with different methods of ID'ing the hoses to particular bags.

some people spray paint the hoses.

when I was @ JTS, Bill Sr. made Id clips with numbers on them so we would know which bag was assigned to a particular control by numbering

the bags as they went down the side of the trailer. The starters would run off the last two controls. We had a habit of moving hoses/cushions

around so it seemed to work for are particular style at the time.

Anyways, we went out a month back a did a bag job in a blizzard. Though I had pat yelling back to glen on which bags to inflate (I didn't want

to harm my singer's voice by yelling), it is just not a functional way.

After lengthy discussions the following week about the job, Ron came up with trying this method, that along with using headsets.

We have a hose identified with every color on the controls with two hoses duplicate colors too reach the farthest bags w/o incident.

In a nut shell, it works great and this test run proved a smashing success

 

PGhrist said:

Awesome team effort... looks great! Any pics of inside trailer? Take care all!

 

Oakwood Service Center:

This was a great job. We have done several of these walking floor and usually they spill the load all over the place. When I got their and

saw that we did not have good access to the load and it was intact I figured it was a perfect bag job. I called for our 25 ton Jerr-Dann

and additional personnel. I was already in the area finishing up a fire truck job with our 35 ton Challenger. We had a total of 4 people

Bob (my Dad) WM 4/5, Rick WM 4/5, Tom WM 2/3, and myself WM 6/7a. We sent our 14 Ton century and a 12 ton century so we c

ould keep the operators somewhat available as needed. We staggered thier response because I knew it would take Glen a while to

lead Scooby out in the cold.

What Scooby didn't say (to be polite) is that when we set this up, it was still in the ditch leaning hard and sunk into the mud. It took

all three of our wreckers and the one Big Red sent to hold it up and winch the thing out of the ditch. It scaled out at 88,000 lbs.

The team did work well together even when we had to walk over Scooby LOL. We do most uprights with 3-4 guys and we sub out the

excavating work. We had 7 people their total from the two company's and we all worked our tails off for most of the day (7 hrs Total)

This is the future of this industry YOU CAN'T DO IT ALL. Evans if it's just a call to a collogue to help out a good customer out of town.

Call them, Get to Know Them, Work with Them, They will make you look good someday. Scooby, Glen, and Mat certainly made us look

good that day.
THANK YOU

PS: if you call Scooby you have to buy him launch

 

Scooby said:

very true.......tks to both you and your dad for taking us out to a real nice place for lunch. I wasn't sure at first when i told you if you

don't by us lunch, I'm going to let all the air out of the bags, that you where just going to take us to McDonald's...lol.

 

Matjackman  said:

Hey Scooby, we've talked about this bag /control id for a while and even though I see what you're doing, I still like the idea of just "candy stripping"

the hose so it is then identified at each end for ease of use, but I don't have to match up particular colors on the control stand which could lead to a

lot of shifting around of heavy hose. Just my thought... Great job though and I remember talking to you during the job when you emailed me some

of these pics off your phone and it was obviously tiring and hard work.

 

Scooby said:

now that i think of it, 95% of the time I'm out on a bag job you call

???????

except you missed me on Sunday, we just couldn't help ourselves, had to use the bags...lol

and you didn't call

 

Canadiantowman said:

nice team work guys good thing there's no tim hortons close by,so how do you stop the bags from kicking out from under the trailer when bringing

her back over.

 

Scooby said:

grip top/bottom surface, the bag angles into the load as it is being lift

 

Curt Sharp said:

What would Ron do without Glen??

Very nice job my friends and it is great to see 2 companies working that well together, WreckMaster Brothers none the less

 

  

 

Scooby said:

very true curt, lets face it, if you don't have a good team of guys to watch your back, then you'll never amount to much. No one person can do it all.

The entire team deserves allot of credit. These guys are the same guys that stay back and man the shop while myself and Ron travel. I can't say

enough about being surrounded by good people. It's a team effort, and when one looses sight of that, well then we all know what happens

 

NR8174 said:

Scooby, Nice job
how long does it take to set up air bags and once the casualty has been uprighted, how long to deflate and put away?
Ricardo

 

Scooby said:

Ricardo, I don't remember quit how long it took us to bag this one. maybe mike or Glenn would know. After arriving and getting suited up and the

equipment out of the trailer (1/2 hour). Getting the bags underneath (maybe 1/2 hour). We had it upright with the bags in under 15 minutes. After

that, mike and his crew removed it to the road surface why we packed up and put away the bags.

The bags get thoroughly cleaned immediately after return to the shop. This job in particular had some harsh road salt and calcium crap on the bags.

Letting them sit overnight with that on them is not a good idea


we had one a few months back, loaded with dog food, down a cliff in a snow storm.

I remember we had less then two hours total recovery time from arrival to driving away. That included dragging the entire unit up to the roadway then bagging it. and a coffee/doughnut break of course