No, you need a zillion of the can lights that vehicular was mentioning.

The 10 ET14 lights that I have make for a very bright, but evenly lit garage. it's not something that photographs well -- cameras automatically adjust exposure levels to achieve a given average brightness.

--Ian

 

Your "basement" is a damn bomb shelter! Unless you've got post tension slabs or just 4" of concrete, I'll be you can put up posts, no problem. Is that where you go when the tornado's get twisty?

 

I had no choise but to dig a basement for the shop, i suppose that going a little further out and building on a few acres was an alternative but this was the compromise i made with the wife ...
I have spent quite a few tornado warnings in the shop basement, i always have something going on that i can do while waiting for the storm to pass LOL, the shop floor is 5" concrete with reba welded to the decking and i beams, commercial steel floor decking and high strenth i beams every 4' i could possibly install a 4 post lift but to be honest i have not gone back to look at the floor load rating and have been getting by with a set of wheels stands that are better than nothing and much worst than a lift

 

For the record, I was talking about the Light of America 4ft fixtures, not the can lights from page 2 or whatever:

4-foot LED Shoplight - Sam's Club



Speaking of, I went and checked out my buddy's shop that I mentioned yesterday. I should have taken pictures. He has 8 of the fixtures linked above mounted on 13ft ceilings in a 27x40, and I think it was plenty adequate. My only gripe was that they have clear dust shields, not frosted ones. Unlike a fluorescent bulb, the individual emitters are bright enough that I could see them causing a lot of eye strain after several hours on your back under a car getting blazed in the eyes by them.

He also used a Sherwin Williams commercial floor epoxy that looked phenomenal. He used two coats of bright white, several big Porsche vinyl stickers, and a coat of clear over all of it. It looked really professional. I have no evidence about longevity, though, as his shop has only been done for 6 months or so.

Instead of drywall he used some sort of half inch thick plastic acoustical panels. They were cheap, looked nice, and made the big empty room not sound like a big empty room. I'm not sure if I like them enough to use them, but they were cool.

 

Ah, OK, the can lights were the only ones I found in the thread that you'd posted.

Those look like basic fluorescent fixtures with LED replacement tubes in them, they are certainly inexpensive but it's a totally different class of product to the GE ET14s. They don't advertise either a CRI or a color temperature, they're not recessed, and probably aren't dimmable.

--Ian

 

I'm going to pose kind of a random thought here about a product I've never seen used in an automotive context, but which is extremely common in the aviation and maritime industries.

And it's not meant to speak to Hammerly and his somewhat unique floor situation, it's more of a general wandering vis-a-vis the eternal compromise between the space / parking efficiency of a 4-post lift and the usefulness of a 2-post lift.

A crane.

To be specific, this kind:



That's a ship that I worked on a few years ago during its construction in Germany. Here you see the big crane, in dockhalle 2, picking up the entire bridge and officers' quarters and preparing to slide them over into place on the ship.

What I have in mind doesn't have to be quite that large (my last garage was slightly too small to park four cruise ships inside of) and it doesn't have to be mounted on railroad tracks and operated by multiple diesel engines, either.

Posit: you buy a pair of steel I-beams the width of the garage, and mount them transversely across the ceiling, supported at either end by an M-shaped truss, then attach two winch motors to each beam.

When not in use, this system consumes essentially zero floor space. When in use, depending upon the configuration of whatever you use to attach the hoisting cables to the car, you can have essentially unlimited access to the entire underside, and could, if you chose, park another vehicle below the hoisted vehicle.

 

They're pretty basic, but they're cheap and bright. I could almost light my whole shop for the cost of one of those GE fixtures with these cheapies.

I can't find a CRI spec (though I think CRI is a pretty irrelevant number), but they do claim 4200 lumens. I have a bit of experience in measuring light output, though, and for the most part it's all guesswork and nonsense numbers. That 4200 lumen spec could equate to anything between 2000 and 4000 real lumens, but measuring light output is such a crapshoot that nobody really polices it. The same thing applies to your GE lights, btw.

 

They had theese overhead hoist at pri for a couple years now, great for pulling engines but not bug enough to lift a car
LK Goodwin Company - Shop Crane

 

I have lifted a miata with a gantry crane in the scrap yard, but it would be a poor substitute for a lift.
The harbor freight crane looks decent.

 

Not one gantry crane, but two. One in front, one in back. And sturdier than those portable jobs.

Better than a two-post lift? Maybe not. But preferable to a four-post in every way conceivable? Well, the folks who build diesel locomotives and train cars seem to think so.

When I worked at Harris' place back in Cincinnati, we had one in the big building that we used to lift the bodies off of box trucks and replace them with boxes we made which contained broadcast control rooms. Kind of like an intermodal container crane.

Now someone just needs to build one for a car.

 

I see the concept now.
Interesting thought.
I remember something similar in my old man's diesel shop, but it wasn't stationary.
Basically two rollable cranes tied together.

 

Yes.

And not rolling.

And with two motorized winches per bar (four total.)


I mean, sure, every motorized winch you can buy says "don't use this to lift heavy **** that people will be walking under," and I'm sure you'd probably die horribly if you built what I'm describing, but I think I'd still prefer it to a four-post lift if I didn't have space / floor capacity for a two-post model or a scissors lift.

 

Uh. How are you going to lift it? Diesel locomotive and train cars presumably have designed-in lifting hooks in their frame, cars don't.

Cranes are also designed to lift things into the air so you can move them from one place to another, they are not designed to securely support them while you walk underneath. Auto lifts have safety lock mechanisms built into them, the car's weight is only being supported by the hydraulics and cables while it's actually going up and down, while doing work the weight is sitting on the mechanical safety locks.

Auto shops sometimes use gantry cranes for pulling motors.

--Ian

 

I'd be sketched out under something like that. Lifts are nice because they have the locking latch thingies that hold them up mechanically.

 

I could see it if you had a set of locking bars to slide under the frame.

 

I guess

 

 

What you need is some kind of post mechanism, with bars to slide under the wheels so that the weight could rest on those. Even better you could get rid of the I-beams and just run the cables down inside the posts, hook them directly to the bars. Maybe replace the four winch motors with a single hydraulic one pulling all four cables...

--Ian

 

I'd trust an ebay 2 post over an ebay winch.

 

See the guys at Juncos racing lifting their formula mazda and indy lights cars with an A frame gantry all the time, they lift the cars from the engine area near the CG and then sit it on top of a couple saw horse like stands and then move the gantry away.
Have to install a hard point near the shifter on the miata and try to do the same LOL