Oops!

We had high winds last Friday.  Another mid-Western blogger wrote about it HERE.  We had sustained winds of 40 miles per hour.  Who knows what the gusts were...maybe 65 mph.

I had very carefully poured an anchor on the windward side of the blind, fully intending to lag-bolt it to the leg.  Obviously, it did not happen.

Now, there is nothing to do but set things right.  Literally.

The first couple of tasks involve squaring up the structure while it is still on the ground.  Then a bunch of diagonal bracing needs to be installed to ensure it will withstand the rigors of tipping it back upright.

Image from HERE

I used to work with a gentleman named Dino.  Dino's dad was a rigger on the railroad.  Dino regaled me with stories of his dad (and a crew) lifting, moving and setting upright steam locomotives that had derailed.  They used little more than wedges, railroad ties for cribbing and sledgehammers.

Flipping a 500 pound deer blind ought to be a piece of cake.

The plan:

The rough dimensions.  The Center-of-Gravity is already four feet above the ground.

Raising the C-of-G another four feet should be be fairly easy if I take it a little at at time.  I need a cribbing plan so I can throw in a shim every four or six inches.  Tipping the structure has the additional advantages of "biting" the feet into the ground so they don't slide and raising the attachment point to give me better leverage.

A rope will be attached at the bottom of the enclosure and run up, over the sill.  Then it will go to the top of a 12' tripod (poles cut on-site), then to a snatch-block, then to The Captain's tractor.  The math noodles out to a rope tension about 85% of the structure's weight.  Peak height of the C-of-G noodles out to about 10'-10" above the ground...so the the job is more than half done once I get to here.

And then I will definitely bolt the anchor to the leg of the stand.  I don't want to do this again.