The Woolevator

The new shop second story is a long ways up there. When we stored wool in the old Red Barn loft you could toss the wool boxes up and the person in the loft could catch them. But the new shop is much too tall for that. While going up and down the stairs may be good exercise, when there are something like 100 fleeces to move that's a lot of trips even if you carry several at once. West welded up the crane, we added an engine hoist and Ken built a wooden platform to hold the boxes.

So we had a wool elevator made. Here it is being installed. The idea is that you put the boxes on the platform and use the hoist to haul them up. When it's not in use the crane assembly can swing back into the shop upper story and you can close the doors.
Today Ken and I moved all of the 2008 fleeces out of the hay barn an used the woolevator to get them up to the second floor of the new shop.





It worked really well and was easy to do. Once the fleeces are up there my plan is to set up the skirting table and do final skirting and preparation for sale upstairs. I do a preliminary skirting as we are shearing but this is the final more detailed skirting.


There's plenty of room to store the unskirted fleeces, the skirted and packaged for sale fleeces and still put in all the looms and have space to hold fiber guild meetings or do other craft work. I can't wait for the final bits to be done.