In order to get my driveway back, I needed to move all these ridiculously long panels down to the house. Since the shorter ones were ~10m (and therefore 100kg), and the longer ones 11.5m (115kg!) I needed something more intelligent than just “get more people and make them hate me by lifting heavy things.”
Cue the development of Paul’s Patended Panel Perambulator:
With the help of a set of wheels and an axle from Bunnings and various bits of timber from my stash, I threw together this….thing. The idea was to lift one end of the panel, wheel this in underneath it and centre it length-wise under the panel – it would take all the weight, and we could just roll the whole mess down to the house. And….surprisingly, it actually bloody worked:
Generally we had two people “driving” it, using the ends of the crossbars to push it along, while the third person kept it level’ish and steered, and no one really had to take any large weight. Compare that to the 6-8 people with lifting slings we would have needed otherwise, with everyone lifting 20-30kg each as we staggered down the sandy slope. I would probably make it a bit lower next time, and source some bigger wheels (it dragged a bit in the sand), it didn’t really need to be that high and it made mounting/dismounting a bit harder, but I was worried about it being too low and making it easy to strike an end on the ground. We also hit a lump of concrete at some point, making one of the wheels a bit sad:
…and had to do a bit of running repairs (the little piece of ply jammed into the frame behind the sad wheel) as the frame worked itself loose, but overall this was a massive success. Two and a half hours later, the driveway had reappeared and the panels were all neatly lined up either on or near the house slab, ready for wiring and lifting: