Sometimes you just can't win.

One of the research center left the UW and moved to Florida. They left us our rolling mill and a hydraulic wire drawing bench.

Moving the rolling mill is easy - it's big enough that I can't move it myself, so I called Reynolds. The draw bench, however, is even bigger, so it needs to be taken apart first (three major pieces plus two or three stands). I started unbolting things and unhooking cables & hoses, and then decided that the easiest way, really, would be to bring in my forklift. I measured the lab doors and the freight elevator to make sure that it'd fit (remembering that the inside elevator door is smaller than the dock-side one).

While I was walking the lift over, the freight elevator got stuck between floors. I'm temporarily out of things to do until it gets fixed. Any of the other projects I need to do require tools, all of which are in my toolbox on the 6th floor next door (where the draw bench is), and my toolbox doesn't fit in the passenger elevators.

Now I'm taking a break in my office waiting for my boss to finish the poster she's making so that I can run it through the big printer.

That'll help

As I was packing up to leave work today, the guys from Reynolds called to see if I could flex my schedule enough to let them move my stuff on Tuesday instead of Monday. I said "Sure. Go for it." since it means that if they get the freight elevator unstuck I can probably get enough done tomorrow to not need to work on Friday.

In other news, science is a really powerful tool. I ran out to work today for Teflon film and liquid nitrogen. These, together with four pipe clamps, two quick-grip clamps, and a couple pieces of 2x4, were required to unstick the lid of mom's pressure cooker. She had bought a new gasket, but the new gasket was a little thicker than the old one, so once they closed it and heated the pot up (with a couple quarts of water inside to test it out), they couldn't get the lid off. I used all of the clamps to compress the gasket, then slid the Teflon in between the metal /metal locking points, and flipped the whole works upside down so that I could pour LN into the seam where the gasket is, in hopes of freezing it in the squashed position so that I could unstick the lid. It almost worked - I ended up using one of the 2x4s as a club to pop a bit of ice loose so that I could open the lid, but managed to do it before the gasket warmed up enough to expand.