Post Earthquake Shop Clean-up

      So I mentioned last time that we have just returned from furlough.I know, I know, we are supposed to call it "home assignment" now.  Call me a traditionalist, I still call it furlough.  Maybe I like feeling connected to the generations who called it that before me.

       Anyway, so while we were gone, (several months ago) there was a huge earthquake that really shook up Ukarumpa.  Thankfully we don't have much in the way of big infrastructure to crumble or fall down, but there was lots of little damage.  We were amazed to come back and find our house almost completely unaffected, but my work area at the AutoShop was another story.

      See those shelves?  The upper ones that are almost completely bare?  When I left, those shelves were groaning under the weight of a large collection of motorcycle parts.  The earthquake threw almost all of them right down on my floor.

      Several of my friends offered to clean the stuff up for me, but asked them please not to, because I knew that if they did, I would just have to go through it all again to get it organised. And so it sat, knee deep in some areas, until we returned to PNG.

     When we got back, I was told I had a full month to try to get it all reorganised.  Part of the reason why everything fell down was because the parts were all stored in a rag-tag collection of old cardboard boxes of various sizes.  To make my job a little easier, I decided to make the shelves a little deeper, make them a lot sturdier, and then make up a bunch of plywood boxes to replace the cardboard ones.  Here is how the first set turned out:

     I'm definitely not a carpenter, but I think these boxes turned out pretty nice.  As you can see if you click on the image, they are sensibly labelled with things like "Headlights #1"  "Scrap brass - heavy" and so on.  The workbench beneath the shelves is also tidy, and perhaps most remarkably, here is the floor: 

     I'm aware of the fact that many of you are thinking, "it's still a mess", but trust me, it has been many years since so much of this floor has been so clean.  The other side of my motorcycle lift still looks like this: 

     So as you can see, there's still a ways to go.  Believe it or not, most of the 9-10 engines visible in this picture were neatly stowed away at one time.  I would very much like to have seen this whole avalanche of motorcycle engines have come cascading out from where they were!  It must have been something to behold and must have made an awful racket as well.

      Anyway, in all I ended up making 30 bigger plywood boxes and I think 3 smaller ones.  Some of the labels started getting a little goofy and I began to get "clean up fatigue":

 

 

 

     Not done yet, but at least I have enough stuff cleaned up to be able to start doing regular work and can do more cleanup/organising between those jobs.  The sharp eyed among you will notice that the tops of the workbenches still look pretty cluttered.  You are right, they are. But my main lift is cleared, the secondary lift is cleared, that's more than enough to get us going.

         Andrew, in Ukarumpa