My dad often asks me where I learned to design and build the fanciful creations we turn out from our shop on a regular basis. When I tell him I learned from him he just shakes his head and laughs but it is a fact. While it is true that he never worked with steel or concrete as we do, he was always building projects when I was young. And although I may not have appeared to be paying much attention back then I certainly took notice how he would do a few rough drawings on some scrap paper and then break out the tools and get to work. Nothing was impossible if he took a little time to figure things out and then work hard to make it so. Applying those very same principles still works to this day in our shop - no matter the project. And I am doing my best to pass those same valuable lessons on to my kids and my grandkids as well.
We begin work on a very exciting project next week. It will be one of the largest drums in the world, made from welded, Corten steel (a first for us). As with every single project we tackle, there are many special challenges and considerations we needed to figure in to our planning to do this job. Because of the remoteness of the final site, pouring a concrete foundation is not practical. We will instead pour a concrete layer into the bottom of the base to act as a floating foundation and act as ballast to ensure the drum will stay where it is assembled. Loose gravel, locally sourced, will fill in the balance of the welded steel base to add more weight. Because we are in the rainy season locally, the gigantic drum and base will be fabricated inside our shop in sections which will just fit out of our doors, lift onto a truck for transport and easily bolt together with minimal equipment when they arrive on site. Once the fabrication is complete, the drum will be transported by truck more than three thousand kilometres (nineteen hundred miles) north to the Arctic Circle in the North West Territories. About seven hundred and fifty of those kilometres (almost five hundred miles) will be by ice road (winter only) which means the project must to be in transit by the beginning of February to ensure safe passage before the ice melts. The drum and its base can’t weight more than twenty thousand pounds. The total load can’t be more than eight feet, six inches wide or more than ten feet, ten inches tall in order to legally fit on the low bed truck. It took some head scratching and figuring along with a few of those rough sketches on paper but we have it all planned out. Now, it is time to get busy and start the fabrication. This is going to be fun!
