Oct/091
Apogee has arrived!
After a delay of a couple days due to the container ship captain being afraid of a tsunami…we finally got our solar car!
We drove our rental van and rental truck to DB Schenker to unload our container and get our Solar Car and our Ford E350 Van. Sasha, Matt, Nathan, and I went into the warehouse to unload the container while the rest of the team prepared the other vehicles for accepting a greatly increased load of cargo.
DB Schenker
The team waits
Once inside the enormous warehouse, which processes everything from our solar car to Dell computers, we had to put on extra-dorky “visibility vests” to prevent us from getting hit by forklifts going 25MPH.
Behind the scenes at the warehouse
Container!
We open the doors to the container (which were sealed by this kind of interesting, “tamperproof,” metal strap) to find ourselves an intact Solar Car and Van!
The Solar Car and the Van after we open the container for the first time in months
We had to carefully unload the container, which was extra fun due to the wooden beam put in place behind the van’s rear wheel that required a combination of a crowbar and a circular saw to remove.
After transporting the Solar Car outside, we loaded it into the truck by picking it up (easy!). It fit by about an inch. In the largest truck we could get in Australia without a special license. Wow.
Then we needed Nathan’s spiderman skills to strap the car down.
Packing the Truck
An extremely awesome local automotive training school gave us some space to work on our car for tomorrow, so we transported the mess in the Solar Car shop directly to them.
Solar Car!