Technical Little tips and tricks for garage hobbyists.

You down under guys are creative!

 

A cherry picker would work and it'll let you move the motor instead of the car. I've pulled many motors that way

 

It's a little redneck (the local version of a redneck is a "bogan", pronounced bow-gan). It saves me having to store a cherry picker, A-frame or engine crane in what is already a tight space. It's a new shop, but built in a very residential neighourhood (1/4 acre block). It took quite some design effort to get enough room for the hoist, and still meet code. One of my neighbours is not impressed (he thinks it looks like a warehouse), but it is legal. The hard part is that even though it is a new shop, it has very little spare room. Plan is to store the FED on it's trailer on the hoist, and have the project sedan under it.

The hoist manufacturer would likely not approve of my creativity. The load either side of the two hoist posts is supposed to be balanced on the four arms. This prevents the hoist toppling. I'm taking a risk that there is enough leeway in the design that a 400lb offset to one side of the posts is within the design margin of my 10,000lb hoist. YRMV.

Cheers,
Harv

 

understood

 

FWIW A youtube channel I watch often pulls engines with a 2-post hoist using only one arm and a chain.

 

Yep, I reckon there is a fair safety margin in hoist design. My son uses a hoist every day at work, and some of the shenanigans that their hoist gets used for are a lot more severe than what I am doing.

One photo I should have added to my original post is how to get the hoist arms to move in. Once the hoist is up, the locking mechanism stops the arms moving. You can lift the locking pins to get them to move if you want to. This is painful though, as you are trying to get the two arms to move in just enough to fit the yellow lifting bar.

Lift locking pin, move arm, test for bar, repeat many times until the bar fits. Ain't nobody got time for that.

A wheel nut (lug nut) makes a useful tool to override the arm locks, and let you finesse the arm position when they are up. I put some "remove before flight" tags on them to stop my dumb *** from leaving the nuts there after I am done engine lifting. Keeps it safe when the hoist is used normally, but pleasant to operate when doing engine lifts.



Cheers,
Harv

 

The hoist manufacturer would likely not approve of my creativity. The load either side of the two hoist posts is supposed to be balanced on the four arms. This prevents the hoist toppling. I'm taking a risk that there is enough leeway in the design that a 400lb offset to one side of the posts is within the design margin of my 10,000lb hoist. YRMV.

Cheers,
Harv[/QUOTE]

Probably all right, but you could just put some weights on the other arms to be safe.

 

Probably all right, but you could just put some weights on the other arms to be safe.[/QUOTE]
Just a little thought. If you could get an I-beam wide enough to fit from bracket to bracket where the 2 arms each side bolt on, and set it on top of the upper bracket, you would have a balanced load on the part that is designed to take the load. And a little bonus could be using a chain fall trolley to be able to move the load side to side to help with alignment. Just make sure you get the beam wide enough so that it doesn’t fall off the brackets

 

Oh, and cluge up a method to bolt it down to those top plates

 

Lifting a 283 using the 2 post lift;



This is in our old shop, we had installed the posts using 1/2" steel floor plates to more safely distribute the load and also added upper support arms from the tops of the lift posts to the wall frames. I'm a big chicken when it comes to safety, as kids we lifted anything on any old lift and rarely worried about consequences. We were lucky.