Perch jerkin’ at its finest.

Brother Gebelle prepping the school bus prior to some jack team work

Train, fish, play barbies and repeat has been the order of the last few days.  Here are some of the findings, pictures, and video of using a First Responder Jack with our new sleeves on a school bus.  We have used the sleeves in several different scenarios now with good results.  Check out the previous post here.  Our next goals are to get into some more industrial settings and a roof collapse onto the second floor which pins a victim.  Please share some thoughts on possible scenarios where this set-up would possibly be useful.  We would like to try your ideas.  We don’t think the sleeves are an everyday tool, but they may get us out of a bind when a life is on the line.

FIRST DUE TACKLE ON FACEBOOK

The sleeve design is still a work in progress.  We have made it a few different ways in an attempt to see what works best in what situations.  In some of the pictures you will see a handle, which is very useful for set-up.  The handle has gotten in the way a few times by preventing the jack from sitting close to the object being lifted (right pic).  In the picture to the left, you will see we added two sleeves for the jack post and a handle.  This provided some flexibility.

If you look at the picture below closely, you will notice the sleeve has run out of jack post.  By jacking any further the jack mechanism and the sleeve will come off the jack post creating the 4×4 and load to come crashing down.  In the video further down in the post you will see the height limitations of the 4×4 used.  By using a longer 4×4 we could have lifted higher.

The stability of the jack and the load was good in this scenario.  If the roof of this school bus was crumpled more and a victim was trapped, cribbing the voids created by the lift would be critical.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/dtSpk5HoMII[/youtube]

Caps

So far we made 3 different caps.  The one used above has a bit of an overhang on one side by design for this exact scenario on the bus.  We plan to make more caps of varying design.

Pass it on!