Might work if your garage is a steel building and your car has a cage.

I worked at Mazaak, a world leader in producing CNC machines. Once a machine is complete, they use essentially the same type of system (although the hoist rides on a beam, with wheels on each end riding along 2 similar beams) to pick up and set the machine on semi-trailers. Assembled machines were like 12-20k lbs if I remember correctly.


Scary part of the operation was using synthetic fiber tow straps as the way to lift the machines. I never got to a point of trust w/ those things.

http://www.cranewerx.com/Cranes%20pi...e_girder_1.jpg

Girder Crane... thats what they're called!

I thought something alone those lines would be called a gantry crane?

I would love to work under a suspended car. There must be a good way to do that. Maybe when I build my garage I will build it strong enough for that. Cranes and hoists are usually designed to be worked under.

I'm not a structural engineer. I'm not a civil engineer. I'm not allowed to write "P.E." after my name. Hell, I'm not even an architect. But I would think that using through-bolted load plates there are ways you could distribute the load into the roof truss structure such that each point could tolerate having 600-650 lbs hanging from it. Realistically speaking, this is really no more load than one very fat person standing in front of one fully loaded refrigerator on the ground floor of a house built over a full basement. Would the local building inspector have a stroke if he saw it? Yeah, probably. Would it work well enough so as to not widow your domestic partner? My gut says yes.

http://img30.picoodle.com/img/img30/...Pm_5d08d5d.gif

http://img26.picoodle.com/img/img26/...em_23dffd7.gif

Joe,

I don't know anyone brave enough to risk their house (or garage at least) for a trial/error assessment. :)

http://www.multinail.com.au/deployco...ss_plate_l.gif

I wouldn't *truss* this to hold 600+ lbs. Would you?

You see how the rails are mounted on the VERTICAL colums? They carry the stress to the floor.

I am not a civil engineer either, but I wouldn't trust Joe's drawing enough to get under that car. I have taken enough mechanical engineering classes to know the load needs to go to the floor more directly than through a wooden truss. Wouldn't be hard to do when designing a garage, but would be far more difficult to retrofit.

Ok, so in some parts of the country they still use those perforated metal things. (and I just realized that the first image I posted shows them.) Get thy ass up into the attic and secure it right.


So do the load-bearing outer walls of a garage. At worst, you'd need two floor-to-ceiling posts in the middle (assuming a conventional side-by-side 2 car garage) similar to those found under the backbone runner in basements, or running down the middle of garages in two-story homes with living space above the garage.

Sorry Joe, I'm with everyone else. I lift 50-500lb parts all day at work with those jib cranes and I wouldn't trust one suspended from anything wooden.

Project84, my company has Mori Seiki lathes, Haas, Okuma, Takisowa, HES, and one lonely Mazak. Some of those are very new, and some are very old, but our Mazak (super quick turn 15m I think) has the FASTEST tool changes I've ever seen, scares the shit out of me every time.

That being said, fuck you and propitiatory conversational Mazatrol software bullshit.

LOL

We don't have any Mazaks here. Mostly Mori Seiki, Makino, Hardinge, Okuma machine tools.

Our shop is all Okuma, Haas and Mori Seiki as well.

Last place I worked had a Mazak but I never worked on it.

We have 5 big girder cranes here, and I can guarantee you even a small one would need a pretty serious structure to hold it.

It *might be worth it to erect some beams that blend in with your garage's posts and walls, and place trusses close to the ceiling, but I'm sure you'd be approaching two post lift costs by then. Any kind of carriage system attached to a single cable would be complicated and prone to turning once in the air. Imagine hitting a suspension bolt with the impact and watching car rotate into sheetrock...or worse, towards you.

Actually, since the hoist is going to be configured in a double-line configuration, you could attach each hoist to one truss, and the cable to an adjacent truss. Only ~300 lbs per attachment point. I know from practical experience that even the horizontal member of a ceiling truss (at some distance from a load-bearing wall) can support a 300lb weight.


Maybe. I can see a system consisting of two eight-foot I beams or C channels run perpendicular to the car. At each end, they are set upon a post of the sort found in the basements of homes holding up the spine of the first floor (or whatever the technical name of that beam is). They'd be anchored to the wall or ceiling to provide stability, but no significant load would be placed on the house.


How much would all this material cost? I haven't a clue. Probably no more than a couple hundred dollars if you can source it all locally. If the steel and related hardware wind up costing $400 (which I think is on the high side) you're still well under 1/2 the cost of a two-post lift once you factor in freight.



Four hoists, four cables. The car might sway back-n-forth a few inches if you're trying to break the crank bolt free with a cheater pipe.

This could work. May be hard to get them all to move the same distance at the same time....but at that point it's fine tuning and wiring.

If you welded the structure yourself it could be affordable.

My only other issue was with time to attach the car to this rig...but if you used chain hooks all you'd have to do is slide your two cradle bars under the car and hook the four points.


The more I think about it...the more I like it....kinda like Megan Fox.

I was just a temp, bro! :laugh:

No seriously, I wouldn't like working for another Japanese owned company. They paid well, that wasn't even worth bitching about.... but.... at 18 years old as a temp I was mandatory 60 hours a week which they worked 6 days and every other Sunday. I literally went like 4 months just waking up to go to work and coming home to fall asleep. On the weeks we worked Sunday's, that meant 68 hours.

Full time employees were mandatory 70 hours and every other Sunday.

Lots and lots of people slept while standing in the break rooms for our 10 minute breaks. I slept inside the "cages" or frames of the machines since I worked in production and knew it took a minute and a half to walk to the break room when the horn blew.

JOE,

Don't hoist anything using your roof trusses, it's just a bad idea and if something happens you won't be able to explain it to insurance. Besides, for 4 of those hoists, you could buy a kwiklift. Apparently they're pretty sweet.

Ok, so the trusses are a bad idea.

Still, you could easily fashion an inexpensive (and stable) overhead gantry out of two I beams and four architectural support columns. For what that would all cost, I could purchase roughly 1/2 of a KwikLift, assuming you factor in freight costs.

As I said earlier, I don't like the Kwiklift concept for a couple of reasons. I don't want a bigger, heavier version of jack stands. I want something I can stand up under, easily remove the wheels and work on the suspension, etc.

A KwikLift also does not double as an engine hoist. This does.





It'd be very easy to build a single controller that allowed you to move all four motors together, move them in banks (front and rear) or move them individually. No electronics even, just a couple of double-pole toggle switches and some relays.


Use bolts. Stronger, easier to install. Same way they put bridges together.


Assume that one side of the gantry abuts a wall. The two cradle bars each have an eye-bolt at either end. Leave the end of each beam which is nearest the wall attached to the cable at all times, and rest the beams upright against the wall (they'd take up less wall space than a pair of ramps.) When you want to lift, lower each beam to the floor, slide it under the car, and attach the far-end cable. You could probably have the car in the air and crack open your first beer in under five minutes.

Scissor lift for suspension.

Jackstands for exhaust and drivetrain.

I wouldn't recommend paying $2k for a scissor lift, though- I got mine for $600, and that's the right price IMO considering the somewhat limited utility.

Find a local shop equipment salesman and let him know you're interested in picking up a used lift. My friend's uncle was one; my scissor lift is one he took as a trade-in on a new lift from a neighborhood garage. $30 for a new hydraulic line when I installed it, $6 for a couple quarts of ATF... Have had it for six or eight years now; no trouble at all.

I wouldn't trust a crane for anything to work under, myself. Cranes aren't actually designed to suspend things to work under, they're for lifting and transporting objects. Thats my take on them anyway, having worked in a shop using Gantry cranes suspending from the ceiling designed to hold a 40,000 pound load... I wouldn't EVER get under one..

http://jugrnot.com/IMG_3722.JPG
http://jugrnot.com/IMG_3730.JPG
http://jugrnot.com/IMG_3735.JPG
Would you work under that??

Oh right, I suppose one of us who works in a shop should've mentioned that you're never, ever, supposed to even walk under something that's suspended by a crane, much less work on said object while under it. We actually had a guy die at work a year ago. He was an idiot and lifting something with an unrated lifting 'rope'. It fell to the ground, tipped over, and crushed him.

Hey elesjuan, I've got ya beat:
http://www.alliedsystems.com/images/l4115c.jpg

and that's a picture of our smallest one. Our largest lifts 160,000lbs of log, that one only lifts 80,000.

Thats a big sombitch!

Nah, our cranes were pretty small honestly. The biggest one we had which wouldn't move much more than 20 feet side to side was 80 ton while the rest were only 20 ton.

I'll say again.. JESUS thats a big fucking truck! lol...