Re: Saftey tennis shoes and near misses

Smitty, this diverges a bit from the thread concerning the Porter, but your remark reminded me of something I was just thinking about. My first real activity with SVRR was to help with the reassembly of the WH Eccles #3 Heisler down in S.Baker. The reassembly crew on a particular Sunday afternoon was former SVRy CMO Dick Anderson, Ron Brinton and myself. It seems like someone else drifted by, but I don't recall who. We needed to reassemble the front U joint, but somewhere along the line the two trucks had gotten out of time by a few degrees so we couldn't line up the pin to go through the Ujoint yoke. We ended up oiling the rail and moving the engine with a car mover onto the oiled rail and with the rear truck chained, we were able to slip the wheels on the front truck with an aligning bar through the spokes. I was holding up the drive shaft and yoke which was all I could do while Ron was trying to insert the pin, while Dick jockied the front truck with the bar. At some point the U joint yoke rolled out of my hands as I was loosing my grip and dropped to a tie. The weight of the drive shaft and yoke together is considerable and would certainly crush a persons foot. The yoke came down exactly astraddle of Ron's tennis shoe! An inch either way and he'd have been on the way to the ER.