For background: my father worked as an engineer for a paper company in northern Maine his whole career. Technically, the company retired before he did. At some point during the clearout at the end, he wound up inheriting a pile of modular metal shelving that had been in one of the mill storerooms. At his old place, most of it was set up in a storage building (the same one Angus the Wonder Truck used to be in), the rest in the basement.

Today we got around to setting it up in the loft at the VAB, but before we could do that, there was a slight problem.

This is what happens when the vertical panels of your steel modular shelving system are 84 inches tall, and your garage loft has an 80-inch ceiling.

We had 12 of those to cut. So that was fun!

In the process of handing them upstairs, I discovered that someone in the old Great Northern Paper storeroom had added a couple of embellishments to one of the uprights. This one was particularly unexpected:

The other... less so.

Evidently this particular employee had a bone to pick with the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers Union. Two interesting facts about this:

1) PACE only existed for a few years, from 1999 to 2005; it was formed by a merger of two earlier unions and then merged with the United Steel Workers (which now has a colossally complicated name that is still somehow abbreviated "USW").

2) This appears to be one of those custom return-address labels various charities offer in return for a donation. I can only imagine the bemusement of whoever had to fulfil that order.

Anyway, we had already taken the shelves upstairs with the hoist, so once we got the uprights up there, it was time to start putting stuff together.

Remember how I mentioned these shelves used to be in a storeroom in the mill? Some of the shelf labels are still there. Since we had the Kroil handy in case any of the bolts were seized, I couldn't resist when I noticed one of the labels.

(For context, Never-Seez® is a line of lubricants/corrosion protectants, while Kroil® is a very effective penetrating oil, the main purpose of which is to free up seized fasteners. They're not quite the same class of product, but sort of adjacent.)

This was as far as we got today. Progress was slowed a little by the fact that someone had bolted a bunch of the modular cleats, which are supposed to just be held together with sliding pins, in place on a couple of the panels, and we had to take them all apart before we could get the shelves into the positions we wanted. Ultimately, there will be five bays in either direction, mostly covering two of the walls. One more session ought to have them complete, at which point we'll start moving stuff up there and finding places for it.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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