Post #604109 by pjc5150 on Thu, Aug 25, 2011 9:42 PM

When I first started making tikis I went out to the yard waste dump with my buddy Scott and found a big piece of date palm...probably 2 1/2 ft thick x 5 1/2 ft high. Freshly cut, wet as hell. It was WAY heavy (like 300 or 400 lbs) but he & I were able to load it up into the back of my old 4 runner & get it back to his place (barely). Just thinking about it makes my back hurt. My rig was bottoming out the whole ride home. I use a trailer now for hauling big logs around. But when using a pickup truck, I put the log in the middle of the bed, brace it with other logs, and the strap it down good so it can't move an inch. You get a several hundred pound log smashing and thrashing back and forth in the back of your pickup, and by the time you make it to your destination you may be driving a flatbed!

My advice is to plan on moving it when you have a lot of your buddies over! Buy a case of beer, put on a surf guitar cd & your best hawaiian shirt, and start inviting some dudes over for the big tiki (moving) party! (the "moving" part is silent, thus the parenthesis)

And yeah, get it a little off the ground. Rolling it around on big dowel-rods is definitely a good idea.