1130 and its retinue arrive safely in the bay area

At 1:30PM today we backed the truck into a loading bay to unload the first set of equipment - an 1132 printer, 83 card sorter, 85 collator, 59 Verifier, 85 plugboards and wires, and several boxes of blank cards for Bob Rosenbloom.

Much emptier after the first dropoff

Later in the afternoon we unloaded the 1131, 1132, CHI disk drive, and large cabinet full of blank cards into my garage. Doug Martin came to help us with the unloading.

Doug Martin assisting with the unloading on Tuesday

Tomorrow the 1442 reader/punch will be unloaded along with the 29 Keypunch, plus many boxes of ALDs, supplies and other 1130 related gear.

There is also a mountain of software on cards and many disk cartridges to unload. These will eventually be copied and archived for the benefit of all 1130 aficionados.

Trays of blank cards

Manuals will be delivered to Norm Aleks and Brian Knittel, who will eventually get them scanned and shared on their web site. The 29 Keypunch will be delivered to another collector. I will have to find a temporary storage space for all the blank card boxes until they are delivered to the various museums and collectors.

The truck had only a 27" wide ramp, although the Budget web site listed it at 34". This is still wide enough for the rollers on the equipment, although at 700-800 pounds per unit it would be folly to try to ease them down by hand. We clamped a winch to the truck, with pulleys routing the steel cable in line with the ramp. Using this, we could tie a nylon strap around a box, clip on the winch cable, then slowly unwind the winch to allow the equipment to slowly move down the ramp to the ground.

Winching the 1131 down the narrow ramp

Steel cable winch clamped to truck, hooked through pullet to yellow nylon strap on equipment

Alan steering the 1131 to the ramp for lowering to the ground

Pieces without their own wheels were put atop a hand truck then winched down as a unit. The keypunch will be movable in this way, but the 1442 is too long to fit on a hand truck as well as narrow and high. We expect that we will mount casters on the unit while it sits in the truck, then winch it down to the garage.

Further details of the packing work in Kansas and road trip to the west coast will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, Will Donzelli summarized his trip back east with his portion of the equipment - rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.