Moving Week for Clean Fleece NY
This past week marked a very important milestone for the new scouring facility, Clean Fleece NY: moving week! Over the course of four days, our brick-faced, former sports building became home to machines that arrived from all over the world.
The first morning was all about the dryer. With a 52” drop from the loading dock to the floor, bringing in something heavy and large was a tricky proposition, and one we had to call in a lot of help for! Dave and Carver from Capital Tractor worked with Tim at Battenkill Fibers to get the dryer loaded from where it’s been stored in the Battenkill Fibers spinning room. The dryer then made its way from Greenwich, NY, where the mill is located, to the building on Hudson Street in Mechanicville.
Meanwhile, Facility Manager Colleen DiVincenzo was working to coordinate the forklift delivery for the dryer’s arrival, and preparing the installation area with the team from Two State, a company based in Georgia with decades of experience moving and installing textile machinery. What seems like a big job to us is standard operating procedure for Percy and his team, and over the course of several hours they wiggled the 3-ton behemoth into place to prepare for the 52” drop.
Our Radio Frequency Dryer comes to us from a plant in Mexico, by way of South Carolina, and has been in town since December, being stored at Battenkill Fibers until we could figure out a way to make the move. This installation would not have been possible without this critical storage assistance from one of our Hudson Valley Textile Project members.
The afternoon of day one consisted of moving all of the pieces of the opener and the one additional piece of the dryer into a staging zone, ready for the next day.
Day two focused on the installation of our opener, which comes to us by way of Asheville, North Carolina. With help from the Two State team, the pieces of this machine made “the drop” onto the facility floor where they could be partially assembled. Then came the last element of the day: a baler on loan from Battenkill Fibers that will make packing up clean and scoured wool a breeze.
Due to some unforeseen truck troubles, day three was dedicated not to moving the largest piece of the dryer into our space, but instead planning the completion of the opener installation as well as preparing the drop area with steel plates so everything would be ready for the next morning!
On day four, Percy and his team once again proved why they are the best in the business, and smoothly transitioned the dryer from one area to another, balanced and leveled. The dryer was by far the biggest challenge of the project, and required a lot of innovative and professional rigging to make the move happen. The rest of the day was filled with assembly, wiring, bolting, and a final review from Colleen before the Two State team left us–quite literally–to our own devices.
We’re still waiting for the arrival of the final piece, the KiwiScour line which has made its way from New Zealand by ship and is now coming from California by truck, but our dream of a facility is closer than ever. We are so excited about the promise and potential that Clean Fleece NY is bringing to the region. This has been our biggest undertaking as an organization so far. We hope seeing it come to fruition has been as exciting for all of you to hear about as it has been for those doing the groundwork.
Read the original updates in Colleen’s voice below, with details about each step, and make sure to get your email address onto the Clean Fleece NY email newsletter list, so you’ll be among the first to know when we’re able to start accepting fiber for scouring.
We are also still collecting donations for this project, and every dollar helps–visit the Go Fund Me.
-
Move in Week! - Day 1, from Colleen at Clean Fleece
We've reached a huge milestone this week - we are finally moving most (and with some extraordinary shipping luck, all) of our equipment into our space. We'll also be assembling the machines as much as we can, which will give us a chance to take stock of what we are missing, move forward with the necessary electrical work, and more.
Though the dryer has stolen a lot of the attention recently, this week isn't just about moving that one machine - our opener (the first machine in our process that fluffs up the raw wool to make it easier to scour) was also transported on Day 1 and by the time you are reading this it is likely that assembly has started on Day 2. The opener is one of the reasons we have the folks from Two State up from Georgia to help us out with the rigging and machine setup. In addition to the benefit that they were the ones to disassemble and take the opener out of its previous mill in Asheville, they also bring invaluable expertise working with textile equipment.
Percy, the head of the Two State crew, has decades of experience moving and installing textile machinery, an increasingly rare skillset in the United States that we're very lucky to be able to take advantage of. He told us he's worked in every state but the 4 farthest flung - Maine, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington - and has been sent to numerous other countries including Mexico and Thailand. He shared a picture of a carder he installed in Bangkok whose main drum alone made our 3 ton dryer look like a toy. That perspective calmed our nerves about the whole move quite a bit. What feels like a massive piece of equipment to us is relatively small potatoes to Percy! We are in good hands.
~~~~~
Your GoFundMe dollars directly funded this week's effort to get the machines properly moved into 18 Hudson St and assembled, so we wanted to share a play-by-play of Day 1 with you so you can feel as though you were right there with us! After all, we wouldn't be here without you.
Monday morning, 3/6/23:
Percy stopped by Battenkill Fibers to acquaint himself with the dryer he'd be unloading later, then headed on to Mechanicville to prepare.
Dave and Carver from Capital Tractor worked with Tim from Battenkill Fibers to pull the dryer out of its temporary resting place in the middle of the Battenkill spinning room and load it onto the Capital Tractor flatbed. Once loaded, they set off on the half-hour, winding journey from Greenwich, NY to Mechanicville, NY.
Meanwhile, Percy and crew were given the tour of our facility by Manager Colleen so they could get the lay of the land, walking the path our equipment would need to take and solidifying their plan for the 52 inch drop into our space. The rented forklift was delivered to Hudson St and soon after Dave and Carver came rolling in.
Then the real fun began.
Percy and his cast of characters (Butter Bean, Burly, and JC) worked with Dave and Carver, inching that big old dryer off of the flat bed. The dryer was stabilized with a winch chained to it from the truck side. As that winch was released a little at a time, the dryer was slowly pulled off the other end into the loading dock aided by forklift, skates, ratchet chains, Johnson bars, and raw muscle. This activity took a couple of hours to complete but finally the truck was able to pull away and leave the dryer behind. With the forklift towing and the crew course correcting by hand, the dryer then made its way on what amounts to industrial roller skates through the other 15,000 square feet of our building. Then they flipped it around to prepare for the large drop and let the dryer rest.
After lunch:
Carver came back to Battenkill Fibers to fill a 26' Penske truck with the three large pieces of our opener and the one 6' piece of our dryer that actually detaches from the main body. Tim was again instrumental in that loading operation, staging all of the equipment and figuring out how he was going to stow it in the belly of the truck after Carver forklifted it in. Percy and crew seat-belted everything snugly for the journey, and Mary Jeanne Packer, HVTP Treasurer and founder/owner of Battenkill Fibers, volunteered to drive the Penske over to Mechanicville (which she did like a pro, by the way). Percy's folks unloaded the Penske and lined that equipment up for the drop, then called it a 10-hour day.
~~~~~
To wrap up, it cannot be overstated how relieved we are that at long last the dryer has been removed from the floor of Battenkill Fibers.
For context for those newly following our story, we intended for our 3 ton beast of a Radio Frequency Dryer, bought used from a plant in Mexico, to remain in South Carolina until we gave the green light. Some crossed wires later, it landed in our lap in December with no place to put it. And it turned out that the space we were about to lease would not easily remedy the issue. One entrance is too small to accept the machine. The other entrance, which requires travelling through the three-quarters of the building we are NOT leasing, is 4 feet off of our shop floor.
Battenkill Fibers graciously gave our machine shelter until we could devise a plan to get it out of their way - and this week sees the execution of that plan. We couldn't be more grateful for the patience of the staff of Battenkill Fibers and the kindness that Mary Jeanne Packer showed by absorbing the inconvenience of such a massive machine in the middle of her operation. We also must thank our friends at Capital Tractor for the work they've done loading and unloading. We wouldn't be here without them either.
-
Move in Week - Day 2, from Colleen at Clean Fleece NY
The excitement of Move in Week continues!
On Day 2, I met the Two State team at 7 AM and we started dropping equipment.
First they had to take off the set of stairs that is normally bolted to the floor and wall to allow humans to travel up and down the 52" differential in floor height between our space and the adjacent room. Subsequent (and frequent) human trips through that portal will require a step ladder until all machines have made their journey down "the drop".
Percy and crew used the forklift and clever rigging techniques to lower any pieces of machinery they could into our space from the pile they unloaded the day before. Turns out, everything BUT the main portion of the dryer could make the drop just fine with what we had on hand. They did need to do a little additional disassembly to one of the pieces of the opener for stability - when disconnected from the whole, the legs on this chunk were a little Bambi-like and would splay awkwardly. So they took off the legs, easy as that!
Before I move on, I think it's necessary to set the scene so you understand the mood of the day. Day 2 was a lot less tense than our dryer unload adventure on Day 1. Burly was singing from the minute he stepped in the door, and eventually the crew busted out the speaker to accompany the morning's work. We started out in the country genre (Percy quipped we were going to do some crying), ended up finding our way into hip hop territory, and then Beans and I bonded over our love of classic rock - which meant the rest of the morning was fueled by the likes of Fleetwood Mac and Journey.
After they worked through what could be lowered into "the pit", the team got to work assembling the opener in its intended position along our diagonal wall. The opener consists of three main pieces and a control cabinet; on Day 2, they were able to get two of the main sections hooked together. One of those pieces has a 5' x 5' square footprint, and is where the operator stands to feed in the raw fiber. This box connects to the frame of the second section, which suspends the part of the machine where the fiber is fully opened. The opened fiber then eventually drops through a blue tarp-skirted opening directly into a bin we'll set below it. The whole thing is quite top heavy so the Bambi-like legs I mentioned earlier still looked unsteady when they first reconnected them. At that point it was easy to imagine that the whole thing might just vibrate itself into toppling over during operation. But the final connection needed between these two sections of machinery is the duct that the fiber travels through - and once that was bolted into place the whole structure became much more solid.
The textile machinery gods smiled upon us on Day 2. How do we know? These two parts of the opener's structure somehow came out entirely level despite our antique wooden floor with all of its wavy quirks.
I also glossed over the fact that positioning the top-heavy side of the opener was done with a levered manual chain hoist system. The crew took turns hopping on the ladder to pull the lever that advances the chain to raise up the equipment, relieving their comrade whose arm needed a break. This contraption was rigged up to the I-beam that just so happened to sit directly above where we were hoping that part of the machine would go - like we said, good machine luck today. Let's hope it lasts the week!
The final bit of excitement at Hudson St today involved the delivery of a baler from New Zealand that is on loan from Battenkill Fibers. Turns out, we have the type of outlet it needs handy and they do not, so we both figured there was no sense letting it sit. The baler was too tall to fit in the Penske from Day 1, so it was hauled over from Greenwich strapped into the back of a pickup (thank you to the fellows from Mapleland Farms who got it over to us) and Percy plucked it from the truck with the forklift and whisked it over to the drop. After a quick lunch break the crew started to drop the baler, but when the original plan bottomed out the machine was still about 8-10 inches shy of our floor. Some more clever rigging saw them construct a makeshift set of ramps for the three wheels on the baler, built up to the height necessary. With some careful easing, that baler made its way to the true floor and the day's machinery moving at Hudson St was complete.
We're sharing the cost of the Two State crew with Battenkill Fibers, so the last several hours of the day they spent in Greenwich getting some of their machinery up and running. But tomorrow afternoon the truck with the heavy duty jacks arrives and the highly anticipated dryer drop will commence. We'll tell you all about it.
-
Move in Week - Day 3, from Colleen at Clean Fleece NY
A less exciting day on our end than we thought it might be - much of the day Percy and crew were away completing the Battenkill Fibers half of the job they are scheduled for this week. The good news is, the extra time they were able to spend there means they are wrapped up in Greenwich and all ours for the rest of the week.
We had hoped that the truck with the equipment they need to drop the dryer 52" into our space would arrive midday but alas, it was first delayed until 4 PM for a reason unknown to me, and then thwarted again by a check engine light that would have delayed the delivery until 7:30 PM. Percy told the driver he better be in the parking lot by 7 AM the next day instead, along with some playful threats I won't repeat here. The driver was on speaker phone and by the sound of his Georgian "yessir" I'm pretty sure he'll be on time...
So in the last hour of their day the crew did what they could to prepare for "the big drop" - which mostly entailed getting the dryer up on two skates and laying the steel plates under the drop that they'll be using for the rigging magic that Percy has cooked up.
After I explained where we wanted the dryer to sit on the final production floor, we talked through the curious case of the missing feet (if you witnessed my late night box unpacking on Instagram you may have noticed we appeared to have 5 1/2 feet out of an expected 8 for the dryer) and Percy is fairly confident we can actually get away with only 2 feet. If that turns out to be true, we also may only need to use 1 steel plate under the dryer instead of 4. I'll let you know how that shakes out!
I was also able to pick Percy's brain a bit on some of the machines which included a demonstration of how the internals of the opener work. He assured me that the soon-to-be-familiar thwump of the opener made by his manually driven preview would get MUCH louder. While we were over there, Percy and Burly talked through some plans for how they were going to stand up the opener's control box that may or may not involve bolting it into the floor. Burly was the one there with Percy when they took this machine out of the plant, and he remembered differently how that control box was stabilized - luckily Percy takes excellent documentation photos they could reference to settle the argument.
An overall anti-climactic Wednesday will lead to a momentous Thursday, so stay tuned for the big drop and hopefully some assembly updates.
P.S. We do have some news we can share though - the representative handling our freight shipping account informed us first thing Wednesday morning that our KiwiScour scouring line is now physically on a truck and should have left California sometime that day! It has been a long road getting the scouring line into our hands. Its impending arrival will mark the start of the next part of our journey and we can't wait.
-
Move in Week - Day 4, from Colleen at Clean Fleece NY
Thursday was Move in Week Day 4 - and surprise, the end of Move in Week! Percy and crew worked fast and got to go home a day early. Hopefully that means we save a little money too...
Thursday morning we met the truck driver at 7AM (he was definitely on time, no need for Percy to make good on any of his threats) and the crew unloaded the truck. This truck contained a fascinating set of jacks, which in essence operate as manually powered forklifts. These jacks were lowered into the pit and made ready for the dryer drop - the main event of the day.
Before we get into the action, let's set the scene again. JC is the crew member I've mentioned the least so far, mostly because he is the silent type content to keep to himself and get the job done. Feeling chilly as he left on Day 3, JC jokingly called to me from the truck that I better have the coffee on in the morning. Well I'll be darned if I'm not going to honor that request, joke or otherwise - so this last day of work I hauled my water boiler and coffee setup over to Hudson St and made sure there was hot coffee ready as soon as the guys arrived. I made sure to bring my own mugs over as well - coffee warmth when you're cold is so much better in mugs that can slowly transfer that heat to your hands rather than a disposable cup.
Once the jacks were put in place on the four steel plates set just below the drop, they got to work moving the dryer up to the edge. The first part of the dryer to leave the platform was pushed on to two jacks side-by-side. Then as the dryer moved forward, pushed by the forklift at its rear, those jacks rolled backwards supporting that weight. Everything with the dryer has been slow and steady and this was no exception, with many stoppages to course correct so that it wouldn't hit the walls or the doorways.
As the middle of the machine reached the edge of the drop, the skates that were holding weight in that spot were remove and replaced with a steel I-beam that supported the machine horizontally across its middle. This I-beam was resting on two jacks placed on either side of the machine. These jacks weren't fully on steel plates and had a little trouble continuing to move backwards. I had been warned that they could probably use my set of hands to help out with this part (since there are four jacks on the ground to be babysat, and Percy back on the forklift). As luck would have it I ended up on one of the jacks that got stuck due to lack of steel plate, so they kicked those wheels until they came loose then finished the movement part without me, with Butter Bean manning both jacks on the end at the same time.
At this point the machine was suspended completely in our space(but still up 52"), so the tail end was then strapped to the forklift forks and the lowering fun began. Burly took over communication on the floor since Percy had to contend with the forklift roar from his seat. I got to join back in at this point because they definitely needed one person on each jack to ease off of them in unison using a release trigger on each jack. We tried to go at the same pace but it ended up working out better if we did a couple of synchronized lowers, and then Burly would correct for differences by calling out specific people to ease a bit more or even raise back up to meet the machine. Finally we got it down to a height were we could throw the skates under it to adjust its position on the floor. At this point, Percy was able to come down and I was no longer needed.
With a combination of jacks and skates, they got the dryer into position and the one set of legs we had attached. I found out that morning from our US Stalam salesman in the US who can help us find used parts that our machine should have 10 feet, so we were missing even more than I thought when I thought the total was 8! It also meant we were missing not just feet but clearly some full blown legs as well (which is likely where the missing feet are). But Percy was right, we were able to get away with just 2 feet and the other end's frame supporting much of the weight in a distributed manner by sitting directly on the floor. Somehow, we got to level with that abnormal setup. Percy is a magician.
Once the dryer was basically in place, Tim and Angie from Battenkill Fibers came by with some additional equipment including a scale, and were able to witness the dryer in its proper home. Which is to say, out of the spinning aisle in Battenkill Fibers. I'll say again how relieved we are to have alleviated that situation.
At this point the crew split out completing some of the remaining tasks which included: bolting together the different pieces of the dryer, standing up the third piece of the opener along with the control cabinet, and rewiring as much of the machines as they could. Burly has been learning electrical work and was glad to be working on some non-manual labor, until he realized that the machine looked to be wired up in a very odd way with little to no instructions to go with it. When Burly and Percy took this machine out of the Asheville mill, it had already been unwired when they arrived which was unfortunate. If it had been them, they would have been able to leave themselves labels - this was down to a guessing game.
The dryer, in addition to missing large parts, came with nearly zero hardware to go with it. No bolts to attach the back piece, one bolt to put the legs back on, etc. so I ended up needing to make several trips to the local Mechanicville hardware store to pick up matching bolts as we discovered more that we needed. I became the "I'm back again" customer and on the third trip the fella helping me asked what we were working on - turns out he had a hairy forklift experience with our same little loading dock when doing a job for DC Sports when they were still operating out of that building. So we aren't alone in having trouble figuring out how to make that very weird door work.
When I got back, we decided not to put the belt on the dryer because a) the insides need a SERIOUS deep cleaning and b) we are missing at least a couple of the sprocket wheels that help the conveyer belt move, but Percy talked me through how we'll get the belt on there and we left the skirts on one side of the machine un-bolted for easy access once we are ready to do that.
Percy and I took a final walk around the machines to see if there was anything else they could help with and once we decided I was hiding no more parts we agreed that the job was done. Percy called his boss, Cleve, and said the job was done, then handed the phone to me because he wasn't allowed to leave until Cleve heard from me that I was happy. I said I was and I bid the guys farewell.
Move in Week is over - which means we have unlocked a million tasks that still need to be completed before we can start washing fiber. But this is a monumental step we've taken this week. Thank you ALL for making this happen.
