Monday, June 1, 2015

Fluid Power to the Rescue!

Walking the streets of downtown Lafayette, awaiting a lunch set for high noon and a scallop that would turn out to be the juiciest in my life, I spotted a forklift operator in need.  You see, where sidewalk meets flowerbed lies a quagmire of mulch.  And this plucky driver found his rear wheel sinking in -- and fast!

Team Fluid Power to the rescue!

Can Team Fluid Power save the forklift from a slow yet assured destruction in the daisy-ridden mulch?

Tune in below to find out.

With two hands pressed against the forklift's roll cage, and feet straddling the flower-bed of despair, the drive wheels regained enough traction to pull themselves free.

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Exiting McCord's candies with two truffles in my pocket, one champagne, the other mocha, the very-same forklift, doomed mere minutes before, zipped accross the street hauling one of Lafayette's many bear sculptures to a proud, new location.


"All in a day's work, good citizen" I said, tipping my begoggled helmet.




Bootcamp went well!  The highlight of the training, aside from rescuing a forklift from certain doom, was using the Parker training bench.  It is one thing to know that the orifice equation, schematic diagrams, and hydraulic components all have physical meaning and applications, yet it is an entirely different thing to see the applications first hand, make physical adjustments to a hydraulic circuit and observe the effects.  This training bench gave me the hands-on experience necessary to translate the theory taught during bootcamp into practice.

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My experience with the forklift reminded me that an engineered object is only as good as it's operator -- a valuable lesson to be reminded of before heading off to Illinois to help implement designs for human use.

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