Dear Friends,
Good afternoon to everyone except those who designed the stupid software for the Illinois Department of Revenue (more on this later).
The mill has finally arrived. After several days of me pestering the various people involved in the process from the finance and shipping teams, the three pallets arrived on Tuesday afternoon this week. I love a good wooden crate. So rarely are things shipped in wooden crates anymore, both due to the wood costs and due to the fact that its overkill for most shipments. There is just something fun about cracking open a wooden crate though.
We pushed most of the furniture away from the walkways to make it easier to move the various parts from the warehouse in the back of the workshop (which we don't own, but they kindly let us use their loading docks for shipments like this). It made for an impromptu spring cleaning which was much needed, and I think we will use this opportunity when the mill is setup to reorganize the cutting room's layout.
The base for the mill, and the mill itself are made from cast iron and are extremely heavy. In total the mill is 1600 lbs and the base is 300 of that. Trevor helped me a great deal getting the parts all out of their boxes and laid out and moved the base into place. By the time we got that all done, it was the end of the day on Tuesday. Virgil, the gentleman who runs the rear warehouse and a great guy in general, came over and I chatted with him about the problem with lifting the mill.
Realistically, I wasn't able to properly predict how we were going to move things into the room until the pallets themselves arrived. It was going to matter a great deal how things were organized and what their actual precise dimensions were. Everything, but the mill and base was pretty straightforward. The base was very heavy, but our pallet jack was able to get it through the door on its side and into place.
The mill was a different story...
I had spent a lot of time before it arrived contemplating the various ways that we could lift it up into place. We were limited in our modern tool options. The best choice would be an engine lift, but they are $800+ and there wasn't anywhere around us where I could rent one. The old school alternative that I was planning on as a backup was to build a wooden scaffold above the location where it would sit, use the pallet jack to wheel it into the room below the scaffold, and the using cables and pulleys, lifting it to the right height and moving the base under it.
Alternatively, we could use wooden blocks and levers and rock the machine to one side, placing a block under the one side, then rock it the other way and place a block under the other side. By repeating this we could get it up to the height of the base and then hopefully slide it back onto the base. This plan was way down on my list of possibilities due to the concern of it falling over during the lifting phase, and the risk of trying to slide it onto the base.
This is where God provided for us. As I was standing in the warehouse at the end of Tuesday looking at the mill, Virgil came by and we got to talking about the various options. He mentioned that he had an engine hoist in his garage that he wasn't using and that he could lend us for this process. That (thankfully) meant I didn't need to employ some complex system of rigging that I'd never done before.
It did present a new problem though.
When I bought the mill, I hadn't opted to get the "lifting bar" which was a $200 kit that was supposed to be use by a forklift to lift the mill. I knew we weren't going to be able to get a forklift in the room so spending money on that bar seemed silly. However now with Virgil offering his engine hoist, lifting the mill was back on the menu. So the next morning I called the showroom I had visited last week and asked if they had a lift bar kit I could borrow. Thankfully they did and after retrieving that Trevor and I set to work to get the mill in the room.
Before we began to move it, I confirmed all our dimensions and found that the mill wasn't going to fit through the doorway. Trevor and I then took the door frame completely apart to give us a few extra inches, and thankfully it was exactly what we needed with about a half inch to spare.
Slowly but surely we lifted the mill up, and with enormous effort moved it carefully into the room. You can watch the time lapse of us doing that on Youtube here.
In the end it reached its target destination without damage and when it finally was screwed down in place I think we all sighed with relief.
And then I went to put it together... or I would have if it wasn't for the state of Illinois.
A few weeks back, during an internal sales tax audit, I discovered we owed sales taxes to the state of Illinois going back a bit. I had filled out the paper work then to get us signed up, and a letter had arrived in early January explaining that I had 30 days to get all of our back filings done or I would face penalties (which by my calculations would reach into the thousands of dollars). That 30 day window ended this week Friday.
So I spent all my time this week when I wasn't getting the mill here and moved, becoming very good at filing sales tax forms in the state of Illinois. This was made much worse due to the fact that Illinois required us to report our sales tax monthly rather than quarterly or annually, so I had a lot of individual reports to back file rather than bulk ones. And unlike Wisconsin for example that has very few tax jurisdictions to report in, Illinois has 410...
That means each month I have to file a sales report that states how many sales we made in any of the 410 sales tax jurisdictions in Illinois.
This task is straight out of Dante's Inferno. Made worse by the fact that there is no method of uploading an Excel document of your sales, so each one has to be manually punched in. I've had a lot of time to think about it, and I cannot think of a way to make the process more difficult or frustrating.
But just now, this afternoon, I have finally finished filing all the paperwork. So now I'm off to go return the lift kit we borrowed, and tomorrow morning I will begin on assembling this new mill.
Of course I am always behind schedule, but we are surprisingly not that far behind.
Stay tuned for more letters on Thursdays in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.
Ever your servant,
Colin Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
