This was one of the big mysteries that occupied me a lot during the research phase. How does a shipping container get delivered? And even more importantly, how does it get set in place?
YouTube enlightened me a little bit on this subject. I learned that you can use a crane, but you don’t have to. You can have the container dropped in place by a flatbed tow truck.
Ron, my container vendor, confirmed that the tow truck drop off method is the most common one. And because the container yard was only a couple of miles from our house, I didn’t have to pay too much for delivery.
But I wondered whether the tow truck method would work in my case.
Getting a 35 foot tow truck from the alley into my yard wouldn’t be easy. It required quite a wide gate or opening in the fence. Plus the truck would have to line up in an east-west orientation to set the container in place, and it needed another 40 feet minimum in front of the container to be able to set the container on the ground and pull back out of the yard after the drop.
We did get concrete trucks that are as long as the tow truck into the yard by removing one fence post next to the gate. That gave us just about a wide enough opening. All other dimensions were super tight with little to no wiggle room.
What I needed was the smallest possible tow truck for my container and a really good driver. I was lucky and I got both.
Our driver didn’t blink about getting the truck into the yard. However, he had his doubts about having enough room to drop the container and then pull back out. As you can see in the video, he managed both. But he used a little trick.
First take a look how he managed to perfectly line up the truck with the concrete slab. He literally dropped the container within half an inch of where I needed it. I was impressed.
For the drop off, he didn’t want to extend his tuck bed all the way because of the limited space to pull back out. Instead, he suggested to stop the bed a few feet short and drop the container on two wood blocks.
That did the trick, and I was able to remove the blocks and lower the container onto the slab with the help of a five foot pinch point bar.
Just a five foot lever? For what weight? 7,7 metric tons? Well done!!
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
Archimedes