Have you come up with any great tricks & tips for moving? Let me know! Comment or email mike@mikefigueroa.com

My fianceé & I are moving from Las Vegas to Washington state. I now know that relocating is, in the words of a theatrical colleague, “one of the most stressful things we do on-purpose.”

Sure, moving within town can be tough but moving to a different temperate zone carries extra layers of stress & challenges. In my case, I happen to think the payoff well outweighs the rest.

But moving is one of those things that is often done so hastily that we forget to use our intellect to make the process easier (indeed the stakes are often so high that we refuse to experiment for fear something may dramatically go wrong.) This is a particularly pressing issue for those of us that tend not to live on the ground floor.

BUT WHY?! Why is it that we don’t invent, build, and succeed at making one of the most common of modern labors a smarter & easier affair?

Sure, I have for years enjoyed the benefit of wheels when moving my belongings by using hand trucks, piano dollies, and by installing casters on heavy objects. But that’s been the end of innovation in this regard both for me & for almost everyone.

Take a look at the above video of the men from the piano store moving the piano down the stairs, how barbaric!

Surely we have come far enough along that methods & inventions which employ our modern understanding of fundamental concepts of introductory physics, the empirical laws of Nature, and our own dislike of manual labor should be available to to men & women the world over?

Driven by a desire to make things easier on my lady-love (in an embarrassingly un-chivalrous twist of fate I was not able to assist with the loading of our moving truck) I decided that I had just enough time, tools and lumber to do some justice to the grand march of evolution that produced thinking man version 2010 CE: I would build a Simple Machine [wiki].

Since we were moving out of a second floor apartment our boxes would be moving down stairs, gravity is on our side for this operation. I decided to build a slide, ramp or chute [wiki].

Luckily I have piles of remnant wood available from building scenery for theater, so I was able to slap this together quite fast. Basically, I overlapped  two pieces of 1/2″ plywood that each were a bit longer than half the hypotenuse of the stair tread run. I used an air-powered nail gun to join the pieces with 1″ brads. I added a 2×4 piece to the underside of the top to grip the landing/top stair.

After twice-measuring the stairs & material, I added nailed a small piece of plywood to the bottom of the upper chute board. This allowed me to hold the two pieces together in exactly the right spot as I nailed the two boards together while it positioned on the staircase.

I was concerned that the friction of the unfinished & un-sanded wood and the length of the run would overcome the potential energy of the weight of the object combined with the incline. I was prepared to staple heavy polystyrene plastic sheeting to the chute to decrease friction. It didn’t turn out to be necessary – after testing a few boxes, I realized I didn’t even need to push the boxes, gravity took care of the whole job.

In all the hubbub & haste, I forgot to take any pictures. Here I’ve created a limited test recreation plus video:

The users of the ramp were said the ramp worked wonders until someone “stepped on it wrong” and broke it. After that it continued to work wonders; it just had to be adjusted every so often.

After the ease & success of this project, I’m tempted to try all manner of cockamamie ideas for moving that come to my head. This seems like an huge area of human advancement just ripe for the picking!

Have you come up with any great tricks & tips for moving? Let me know! Comment or email mike@mikefigueroa.com

Tags: build, how-to, moving, ramp, stairs, tips, tricks, wood

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 9:50 pm and is filed under General, Projects, Show & Tell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.