Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Bracing for the busy season

Despite it being so warm & cozy in the upstairs workshop throughout these winter months, our volunteer from the prior blog post ("A Little Inspiration...") decided to spend as much time in the meat locker-esque warehouse away from the aforementioned heated workspace. Long underwear can be your friend!

Picking up where we left off, additional shelves have been installed. Remember the wheel pile, aka, "The Inspiration"?

After the last iteration, the wheel aisle looked like this:

...and, unfortunately, things didn't get any better...

But changes were afoot...

Another step in the right direction.

A whole lot of debris was hiding in/under/around the cages.

All cleaned up & ready for the next step.

Room has been made for an additional wheel aisle and two more double rows of bike "shelves".

The shelves are built and ready for use.

Populated: again, with road bikes on top and cruisers below. Cruisers are just too heavy to be stored on the second level.

Still more work was to be done. The area to the right of this pic had 2 rows of double stacked bikes - unfortunately a pic didn't get snapped prior to dismantling the first row. It soon became obvious that it is far easier to stack the bikes than to unstack... Doh!

From this prior blog post pic you can see the double stacked bikes in the background - most notably how the aisle is barely passable & definitely not wide enough to ride a bike through (well, Aaron probably could but...).

The majority of the double row of double stacked bikes were local donation type bikes.

Shelves built and the aisle appears to be wide enough.

Loaded with bikes and sure enough - the aisle is wide enough to safely ride a bike through!

BUT, the bike shelving wasn't the only thing going on. Recall that unsorted wheels was the impetus of all of the aforementioned organization. So, a wall of wheels (the WoW) was built. Before the WoW, about 75 wheels were hung in the aisle between the first two bike racks. Well, now more than 400 wheels can be hung in the same aisle.
The original Mtn Bike wheel aisle:

Why have only 1 row when you can have 3?

By hanging the wheels 3 rows high the amount of wheels stored in the aisle between the bike shelves multiplied by a factor of 6.

View of the same section, but from the other side.

Building the frame & fastening the rods was quite an acrobatic feat.

Once all 3 rows were hung and secure they were ready to be filled with 27" front wheels.

This triple stacking should make finding the "perfect" replacement wheel a cinch.

Opposite side view.

A preview of the second WoW in between the new cages. Unfortunately, we've run out of the hooks :(

Once more hooks are procured, the remaining wheels will be hung. Ideally, all of the wheels that are currently in the original "cages" (see the pics at the top of this blog) will be easily perused and pulled rather than having to dig through a mess sharp metal.


More to come soon...