The big day arrived on Jul 15th, with a crew of family and friends. My son, my wife, a couple of her friends, and a consultant from the vendor. I had ordered a scissor lift, and left early in the morning to pick it up.
I got back to find people slowly unscrewing bolts from the bottom of the roof. We tried getting the scissor lift over, but it wouldn’t run on sand, so we had to take it back and get a articulated man lift instead. This took time, but we eventually got back to find much of the bottom unscrewed. While at the store, I also bought a deep well 7/8” socket and some water pipe, which my daughter took over to a friend’s house to weld into a 20” deep socket.
My wife went up in the lift to start cutting the webbing holding the roof, but came down immediately. She was scared of heights and couldn’t do it.
I went up, strangely not as afraid of heights. I’ve had to climb up here on a ladder and I used a lift for the lights, so I guess I’ve gotten used to being up there. I started to cut webbing and he’s a shot of me working webbing.
Once we got everything cut, things were loose. I was a little worried, but there were still steel cables holding the pieces down on each edge.
From here, we needed to cut the steel cable and the fabric. I went up the outside and cut the cable on the East end, but then had my son go up as I was getting tired. He started cutting the roof.
The lift only goes so far and this is a 140’ long roof, so you can see him moving to cut more.
Eventually he got to the end, cut it, and cut the steel cable. It was less than dramtic as things didn’t fall down. We had to work it down by pulling it away by hand, slowly getting it down. Here’s the undramatic video.
Once we had that down, we worked our way down the sections, cutting the fabric and steel cables. The second section went down better.
I cut the third section down and got a shot from above.
Here’s the entire missing roof from the lift.
By the end of the day, we had the entire roof down. Here’s the view of sunset as we went inside, tired from a long day.
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