Skates on, boys. Steerman SCS-20 caterpillar skates.

Yes, having battled with the Chinesium machine skates while moving the CNC lathe in the workshop, I've been on the lookout for something a bit more capable. For one thing, I will need to move The Shiz at some point, assuming we finally move into a more spacious and better located home at some point. It was moved here using two 2 tonne pallet trucks, something I'm not going to be able to repeat easily without buying, well, two 2 tonne trolley jacks. Better to try to obtain some professional machine moving gear.

So, another day, another accident with a mouse while surfing the internet - and ebay in particular. This time, I found a set of Steerman SCS Caterpillar Skates of the 20 tonne variety for £208. These were obviously ex-hire equipment that hadn't simply sat on the shelf, unwanted and unused. A bit battered but still intact and possibly even usable.

There's not a lot of information on how to use them but with a bit of digging I found a sort of user instructions called "Operating Instructions and Parts List" (which actually contains little more than safety warnings and zero parts lists) and a "Technical Specification" which simply comprises a few outline drawings and dimensions.

There's a large blue, wheeled metal trunk for holding and moving the gear. These are the main components - 4 skates, with 2 fixed, mountable pads and 2 swivel pads:

There's also a couple of angle iron braces to force the fixed pads to remain parallel and a couple of long handles for steering and pulling the front / steerable skates. And a hook with a log handle for general pulling duties.

They were a bit scrappy and dirty. oddly enough. So it would be wrong not to dismantle them, clean them up, possibly paint them and reassemble them.

The "caterpillar" tracks are essentially just chains with very wide rollers. You can see that some of the link pins will be easier to remove than others, possibly including the original joining pins.

Each part has a hire company sticker and a stock number. It's Brandon Hire, which is a nation wide company. They don't seem to keep them any more but Speedy Hire hires them out at £78/week. 

After some degreasant and a bit of masking tape, I slapped some yellow Nitromors spray paint on them.

Don't look too bad. Now I just need to reassemble the tracks and possibly lubricate the rollers.