Holy Crap!! I knew it would be Heavy . . . but I had No Idea removing the wheelchair lift would be the Monumental pain in the butt it turned out to be . . . . .
William Earl brought some serious stereo equipment for the evening . . . including pre-amp, cassette deck, headphone amp . . . . . It truly does help the work flow better . . . . .
We started with Little Feat and moved through Donald Fagan, Led Zeppelin, Faith No More, Grateful Dead, REM . . . working late into the night . . . . .
The wheelchair lift was held in place with carriage bolts . . . access to the nuts at the other end of those bolts was blocked by air conditioning stuff . . . so William Earl planned to grind off the heads . . . . . he couldnt find his grinder and I couldnt find mine and my friend with the well organized tools was playing a gig . . . so he decided to cut them with a Dremel . . . it worked well . . . it just took a while . . . . . . . .
Once the lift was free from its bolts, we were faced with the task of figuring out how to remove it . . . . . The opening was a tight fit and the hydraulic motor would need to be removed . . . . . if we’d had four burly folks or the Incredible Hulk we might have been able to wrangle it out with the pump attached . . . but we were only able to nudge it in small increments with tremendous effort . . . so we ended up disconnecting the motor and spilling hydraulic fluid everywhere . . . but . . . we did manage to remove it without scratching the bejesus out of the trolley . . . a small miracle . . . . .
Ive been pretty philosophical and cheerful about the challenges of this project . . . but I must admit . . . once that lift was in a heap out of the way . . . we kicked it and called it some pretty harsh names . . . . . it truly did feel as if the trolley’s shackles had been removed and she was finally Free At Last . . . thank God Almighty!!!
When the work was done . . . we eased into a listening party and let the whole thing settle . . . . .
. . . there are a few more small things to remove . . . but mostly . . . the deconstruction is pretty much over . . . . .
Now . . . We Build . . . . .
