As some of you already know, The Big Move of my mostly Zaccaria game collection from my UK warehouse in West Yorkshire, UK to Woodinville, WA began on April 28th. The games were moved using a 40ft shipping container loaded with the assistance of volunteers drawn from the two UK collecting forums, UKVAC and JAMMA+.
I arrived in the UK three days before to begin preparations that included collecting my Zaccaria universal cockpit from a local collector who’d been storing it for me and accepting delivery of the two Astro Wars from the Duke of Lancaster that a “delivery man” was holding for me.
To provide overflow storage for these “new” games (my warehouse was already full), a temporary storage area to make wrapping space and a tail lift to get closer to the height of the container we rented a Luton van with a tail lift.
The prior two days was nothing but wrapping and packing everything that was to ship – not only the actual games themselves but all the PCB’s, test equipment, spare components, monitors, etc.
After two days of preparation wrapping & packing the games are ready to go:
The driver initially freaked over the narrow dead end street but with some reversing it ended up in the “right” place to load. One thing that’s not obvious – deep inside the container is quite dark:
A real test of strength – getting the Zaccaria cockpit on. This one and the Star Wars cockpit were the difficult ones:
Half way through loading and so far things are going well.
All games and boxes on. I’d booked 3 hours for loading and everything I’d packed got on in less than 2 hours
There’s a little bit of space left…
Originally, I didn’t have time to sort through & pack the monitors so was planning on being unable to take them but with an hour spare and a little bit of space left we decided to get them boxed and on. The volunteers helped box up the Hantarex's:
After it’s all done, my place is empty aside from the 5 that are staying to be sold off/traded:
Final check with the driver before it’s time to wave them goodbye until early June:
One I’d sold off was a 2 player Gauntlet. After 12 years sat idle the Gauntlet powers up and works fine. The buyer is happy.
Something of this scale would have been difficult to achieve without the help of the volunteers. A big thank you all round. Though I didn’t have much time to chat, it was still good to see some faces I’d not seen in years and some new ones:
Regards,
Paul.
