Grant is back at the factory with another exciting update. We have recently taken delivery of some of the steel tubes which will be used to create the outriggers and central spars for the SeaPod floating base.

Since steel isn’t manufactured in tubes, we have to take the flat sheets that we get and roll them into tubes. This process is done at another facility that is off-site from the Ocean Builders factory and we transport them to the factory in shipping containers once they are done.

Normally unloading this steel would be a fairly simple task with the use of our telehandler which is basically a forklift combined with a boom lift. Unfortunately for us, the telehandler encountered some problems a few days before the steel arrived at the factory and we couldn’t use it to get the steel tubes out of the shipping containers.

Here at Ocean Builders, we aren’t strangers to needing to use creativity to overcome obstacles so we quickly got to work brainstorming ideas for how to get this heavy steel unloaded. The idea that we came up with was to anchor the steel from behind the truck and then have the truck drive forward. You can see in the video below that this worked quite well at getting the steel unloaded but it wasn’t the most graceful or safe operation.

The process of developing and building the SeaPod has involved a ton of problem-solving and thinking outside the box so this was just another small hurdle that we had to jump. Luckily for us, the second shipment of these tubes went a lot smoother and was a lot easier so stay tuned to see how we made life a little bit easier on ourselves on Day 2.