So you moved into the Lake of the Ozarks region? You are not very far away from Buder Park then, and like Doc says, James Mills lives in the area just south of Springfield.
Big trailers need LOTS of attention, especially if they have been sitting for quite a while. The place I was working at last before retirement had two large tandem axle cargo trailers that they used to use for displays and trade shows and such. These were heavy duty trailers and just carrying their own weight was a big load.. I worked there for 4 years and never saw them move. Towards the end the owner decided that she was going to load them up with a bunch of her belongings and take them to her property in South Dakota. The other maintenance guy and myself were instructed to go through the wheels and bearings and such and set the pressures in the tires. We went to that building to assess the situation. The only machinery I had to work on at this place was sewing machines! And we didn't have any sort of facilities to properly take the hubs apart , clean all the petrified grease out of the bearings, and service the electric brake systems, which I really didn't know much about in the first place. The trailers had been sitting in one spot so long that there were dents in the pavement under the tires! I had not seen these things move in the 4 years I worked there and who knows how long before that since they had moved. We didn't have any kind of air compressor that was big enough to set the pressures that the tire required for the load. The tires were new enough that they still had the stickers on them, but were already cracking from dry rot! I pulled one wheel from the biggest trailer, took a look at that rusted mess and called the guy that was the immediate supervisor, and showed him what I found. I told him I wasn't going to work on these at all. They need far more attention than I could give them with just a tube of grease and a few rags! We called a local trailer shop and got a quote of $150 per axle plus parts and that sounded like a pretty good deal and really cheap insurance for when they got out in those deserted areas up in the Dakotas and hundreds of miles from no where! The owner (whom I never did get to meet face to face) supposedly got irate and chewed everyone out but me and I don't know why I was spared. I don't know what they ended up doing in the end. We had the Covid lay off that March of 2020 and when I got called back to work the following June, I was the only one to get called back. We finished prepping one building she owned to put it on the market, did some other work on the remaining building also, but no production ever started back up. The following Christmas of 2020, they announced they were shutting down in March of 2021, so when the calendar flipped over to January 2021, I announced my retirement. The big trailer was parked behind the building all locked up and tires bulging, and I never did hear if they made the attempt tp pull it north the South Dakota, but my conscience was clear in that I warned them of the tragic possibilities of towing it and absolved myself of any responsibility!
Type at you later,
Dan McEntee
Topic: A very not boring move (Read 1134 times)