What's Missed

Expecting symmetry I was confused. Had to measure again. A grand piano is not bi-laterally symmetrical, therefore it follows that the legs are not equidistance apart. There's the issue of equipoise, even distribution of weight. All three distances between legs are different. All pianos are different, the brands; our new one, the upstairs grand, is a Young Chang, which the music guy says is a fine instrument. This one weighs right at 1,000 pounds. The new dolly arrived today, in three heavy boxes, requiring assembly, 14 pieces, 22 bolts. Dollies for grands come in several sizes, all adjustable in a certain range. You have to assemble it finger-tight, lift the piano, take off the little useless casters, hold it in the air while someone adjusts the three arms of the dolly, set it down, tighten the nuts, take the piano off, really torque the nuts, then lift the damned thing on again. What fun, need some guys from the pub, they always joke about wanting to help (Jim said he could hang a show quickly, with a nail gun). This the way I always moved printing presses, bet a couple of large guys that they can't lift something, buy them a beer at Happy Hour. An assembly like this dolly, what I do is lay everything out, bolts next to their holes (the bolts are all different sizes), look at the diagram until I understand it, then start fitting pieces, goes perfectly, each arm gets a caster and a cup to hold the piano leg, top and bottom center plates that bolt to three sleeves, the arms go into the sleeves with a large bolt set-screw to hold them in place, assembled upside down so the nuts and lock-washers are on the bottom (easy to get confused here, but all goes well, I turn the thing over. There are two adjustments possible on each arm: the sleeve pivots on a single half-inch bolt, and the arm goes in and out, maximum "in" is snug against the caster. Killer casters, 5", swivel, with bearings and a grease fitting. The arms dip down, in an "L" so that the piano isn't five inches too high, clever bastards. I lock everything at the fullest "in" position and measure the arms, thinking to get them close to where they need to be, measure the piano again, then measure the dolly. I don't think it's the correct dolly. Despite the fact that I've measured everything so many times, had D call the toll-free number, despite the fact that there was only one dolly (in the online catalog) for Young Chang, stood next to D when he was making the call, verified all information twice. I'm confused. End of the day I realize I could maybe turn the casters the other way, the wrong way, but they are slotted and will fit that way, and the load bearing is the same, gain maybe the few inches it seems to me we need. I built a very interesting studio for a guy once, who could actually do the math that would tell me whether or not moving the arms "in" one inch would be enough to allow a fit. Tomorrow I need to rebolt the casters, I can't do the math. I could make a cardboard model, if I needed to, if it was important, but it's not. Rebolt. Howe and I, the most lucrative stair-job of all time, in Telluride, got called into a Condo job, where the stairs were log stringers with half-log steps, four sets of stairs for four condos. The concrete pour had been off, and the landings weren't perfect, they couldn't figure out what to do. We made a jig, extendable at both ends, turned it into a piece of cake, took us a day to make the jig and install the first set of steps, but we had them all done in a week and paid a flat $300 per set. I bought a 1st, Hard, "Gravity's Rainbow" and a case of Ridge Zinfandel. The back-up plan is that we just carry the fucking piano where it needs to be, in the main gallery, for tuning, and playing at the event. We can do that, it's not even a problem, but I wonder why we have the wrong dolly, we could not have been more clear. I occurs to me that those people on the phone, they've never actually moved a piano, they were flipping pages in a book or something, we really weren't on the same world. I don't flatter myself, I don't need to, I fuck up, I'm wrong often enough that it doesn't seem unnatural, but I can measure; unless the legs were realigned in transport, this dolly won't work for that piano. If you had to turn the casters sideways there should have been a note. I'd do that, if I was shipping them out, -hey, by the way, buddy, if I was doing this I'd turn the casters sideways- but I wouldn't be working there, so that's mute. I wonder what the co-efficient is. It's a complex equation, two unknowns, like most marriages. My gut feeling is we gain enough, if we turn the casters around, still, I hate the fact that it isn't correct, this is an expensive dolly, and I expected it to be correct. Fuckers. I find I'm disappointed in almost everyone's attention to detail, Kim gets it, but almost no one else, so maybe those of us that get it are wrong, certainly possible, too tightly focused, I've thought about this; what you thought you'd learned, what you thought you'd heard, what you thought you'd seen, I came away from this neutral, I didn't believe or disbelieve anything, I just watch.