looking for volunteers to move an old school house using draft power

move = move as is?
would I like to see that! please pictures/film…

I would love to participate with my team of percherons. Sounds like quite an adventure! How much horse power do you think you need? I’ll put the word out on our FB page as well.

hey all, moving a building must have been a big event around here, cause the maine archives are full of photos of old timers moving their buildings. seems that in the mid to late 1880’s folks just abandoned their farms up here in great numbers and the neighbors after a respectful time just hooked on and took the buildings over to their place. according to the pictures, winter seemed to be the time of choice, frozen ground and snow, and oxen were the animal of choice. don’t know why but its not for lack of horses. the photos are full of teams looking on, and occasionally a lead team might be horses. all the photos had LOTS of animal. thirty or forty teams hooked in equal numbers to peeled hemlock trees laid under the buildings as skids. take lots of pictures for the future. best of luck, mitch

My thoughts exactly, Geoff!!! Too many times I’ve seen all the attention paid to getting something to move, and then discovering that it wasn’t the only problem!
John

I am much more optimist about getting the thing to move, especially if the weight is really in the range of 10-15 tons. Divide the weight by four teams (8 animals), and you have the equivalent of 1.25-1.9 tons per animal. That’s roughly twice the animals weight, which on a wheeled vehicle should be easily doable. I agree that there is some loss in efficiency with a big group, and some mechanical advantage would be a good idea especially on hills. Brakes are definately critical too. 1.2 miles isn’t really that far either, even at a very slow 2.5 MPH pace, that is only a half hour of pulling. Not that I think it would only take a half hour, but the point is that there is pletty of time for breaks. Probably a good thing too, as this is going to attract attention from the public. In my experience, the public often doesn’t understand that horses sweat when they work and if some people see your horse sweat, then you have to explain to them why/how you are not being “cruel.”

I hear what you are saying about horsepower, Matt, but this number doesn’t capture what animals can do over the short term, especially with breaks. Pulling horses, for example, exert over ten times this horizontal force figure for short distances. Logging with horses would be severly limited if no team could pull logs weighing more than 800 lbs (400*50% friction). The point being that there is precident set for animals to ruitinely and dramatically exceed there somewhat misleading horsepower figures for minutes at a time. I think the horsepower term and concept is best applied to machines, as there is so much that is not captured by this figure with animal power. I get a much better estimate of what an animal can do by looking at what other animals can do and multiplying and/or dividing by the number of animals, the weight of the object, or the width of an implement.

I know I’ve seen pictures of buildings being moved with horses – one that comes to mind is a 2 story Victorian styled house all blocked up and on some sort of roller setup but the teams were pulling with some sort of anchor winch between them and the load (like a capstan? winch). I couldn’t figure out how the winch anchored to ground …. and it was on some sort of hill, maybe in Chicago or San Francisco.

I think the distance might not be the challenge (rest more often, switch out teams etc) as much as “finessing” it into the final resting place etc.

This is a MUST VIDEO! Make sure it’s on tape (or a couple of them). Perhaps Uncle Joe from RH would be interested.