Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread

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Well, here we are in 2017 and I'm still at least 3months out from moving my office into the house. And with losing the rental space in the warehouse with no more room in the shop, I've had to make some hard choices. But I have to consolidate and keep moving forward.

In anticipation of having full control of the shop property we continue moving forward with the security gate. Set the second set of posts last Thursday. Today we are anchoring the track for the rolling gate.
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Looking good Mark!

I'm going to have to make another trip out to see you :D
 
Well, the weather here has finally been more like what is 'normal' for winter, except its been so long that nobody remembers! We got a break at the beginning of the week and we (my son and I) got a big chunk of the welding knocked out. The fence is all up now, just needing a top brace between the gate guide and the old fence, and the walk in gate has now been hung.

Unanticipated consequence. I now have to think of what Ii am going to do for a mailbox at the front of the property, along with shipping dropoff, since I am often not on the property when the mailman/delivery man makes their rounds.:hmm:
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65swb45 said:
Unanticipated consequence. I now have to think of what Ii am going to do for a mailbox at the front of the property, along with shipping dropoff, since I am often not on the property when the mailman/delivery man makes their rounds.:hmm:View attachment 1384921
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I made nice with my delivery folks and got their cell numbers. Now I send a text when I'm expecting something and we figure it out.
Neighbor collects the regular mail for me when I'm not around...
 
That's interesting Dave! I'm thinking of cutting a hole in the walk-in gate and framing in something like that. I still have to decide what to do with Fed-ups. They barely tolerate my afternoon schedule as it is.
 
Can you build a bigger one out of a 5x5 trash can and have one for regular mail?
Just a thought :idea:
The one I am showing you can get at home depot.
65swb45 said:
That's interesting Dave! I'm thinking of cutting a hole in the walk-in gate and framing in something like that. I still have to decide what to do with Fed-ups. They barely tolerate my afternoon schedule as it is.
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We used to have over night delivery. In the beginning an extra door was made in a room attached to the outside wall. Later a 12 foot container was stored outside. The delivery trucks had a key.
I don't know what your regular size delivery is but you could build a package container with 2 doors to pass the stuff through in and out.
 
Number 1, I don't understand how it works . If it's a box anyone can reach into, it's obviously not safe. If it requires a key, I would have to find out if the mail carrier for my route does that.
 
Well things are still moving along. Hope to get the gate basically finished today. Pics to follow.

I arranged to give away 3 of my dad's safes to a friend of a friend. One of the smaller ones had been in my dad's bedroom. I had it moved out of the house and over to the warehouse when my mom sold that house.

The safe has a small inner safe that I could not find the combination to. So I had the nagging feeling that, 17 years later, it was like one of my Landcruiser projects that I had put away intending to get to, but never did.

Add to that the nagging memory of a story my uncle had told me of my dad drawing down on him with a Dirty Harry.357 which I had never found, and I knew I couldn't give the safe away without at least taking a peek.

One of my mechanic buddies gave me a boroscope camera for my 50th birthday. So, armed with a close quarter drill and a box of bits, I went over on Friday.
 
It's like when Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's secret vault:

For gangland aficionados, it was almost as good as the Super Bowl. On April 21, 1986, nearly 30 million viewers tuned in to The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults, a live primetime excavation hosted by Geraldo Rivera that promised to dig deep into the catacombs of the criminal’s hotel hideout on Chicago’s South Side. For two hours, Rivera shouted over power tools, ignited dynamite, took target practice with a submachine gun, and teased the possibility of finding money, weapons, or the decayed corpses of Capone's rivals!
 
The fence is done.

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:bounce::bounce: Another chapter closes. My mother emailed me yesterday to let me know the insurance company settled the claim. Although I initially wanted to be involved in the negotiations, to see how strongly her adjuster challenged the insurance company's estimates, I had to let go. The opportunity cost was high, and he was HER adjuster, not mine. Lastly, the argument would have been mostly academic, considering the $$ wasn't going to go into actual repairs.

My only remaining curiosity with the process is whether the time 'required' to process the claim isn't manipulated by the insurance company for the increased likelihood that the insured will sell a damaged, vacant property before settlement negotiations are concluded, and thereby loose some 'tooth' for arguing over the settlement offer.
 
Another load of driveshafts and axle shafts coming home to the lemonade stand.
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Oh yeah, back to the safe.

There is still no electricity on the property, so I could only go over in the daytime, and only when the new owner's workers were there, continuing demo work on the other two units. I donated the 4kw generator I purchased for doing the cleanup to the new owner as part of the sale negotiations, so I was back to being dependent, and less discrete that I would normally be under such circumstances.

I moved the generator into the adjacent unit and ran my hundred foot cord into my unit, plugged in and, as Sarah Palin said "drill, baby drill!" The bit caught at the very end. Panic. Don't break! Not now! Backed it out, ran it in full bore. Hole achieved. Assembled the cable onto the monitor, dropped the probe in, and....there it is. One Colt Python. My face was pressed to the glass of the monitor like the kid in the Christmas Story looking thru the department store window at the Red Ryder BB gun. The lot was cast. I had to break in to the safe.
 
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So I made arrangements to have the generator left in the adjacent unit (the one that caught fire) which I still have a key to the padlocked door, and planned to return Saturday (away from watchful eyes) with a grinder, a box of cutoff wheels, sawsall and multiple blades, and have at it. The plan: grind virtually all the way thru the half-inch steel plate in three lines forming a triangle, make three penetrating cuts with the wheel, one on each side of the triangle, then finish the job off with the sawsall, minimizing the chance of igniting papers inside the safe with grinding sparks.

Picking the three lines actually took several minutes of calculations, as I had to make sure I could get BOTH tools INSIDE the safe to do their jobs. So I actually ended up making the cut closest to the front on an angle, where it was more like cutting through 3/4" because of the angle.

That much grinding, in a T shirt, and you know I burned the crap out out of my forearms just beyond the gloves. Went through 5 cutoff wheels. But it worked. Nothing burned.

Laid some rags over the jagged cuts in the safe and pulled the gun out. Absolutely cherry. She's a beaut. Pulled a half dozen paper bags out (which I couldn't make out with the camera) Morgan silver dollars, several hundred silver quarters, and some some other valuables I took over to my mom the next day.

My dad's wallet was in there too. A few family pictures, a couple with friends. The pictures are what get you sometimes. He had a couple of the family visiting me in the Conservation Corps, which was a life-changing experience for me, and perhaps for all of us, the eldest leaving the nest and all. And it got me that I had to tell my mom who some of the people were in the pictures. Makes me realize how much of a blessing this may have all been, to have happened before before she lost any more of her faculties.
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