Attic Elevator V3 0

well welcome to the introduction to the attic elevator video I've been planning this for quite a while so I thought I'd give you just a little bit of background I decided to do an attic elevator primarily because I wanted to offload an awful lot of the stuff we had stored up in the Attic of the garage for probably the last 20 years my concern was primarily one we had a lot of stuff up there that we just didn't use and needed to get rid of but the major concern was as I did just a little bit of research I found out that most attics are not designed to carry a load they're designed to support a roof so putting too much stuff on the bottom trusses of your roof rafters is not a good idea so for a variety of reasons I decided that getting stuff out of the Attic was a good idea and because there was so much stuff up there an attic elevator made a lot of sense secondly I wanted to do this on an ongoing basis because someone pointed out to me that if I just made 15 or 20 trips up and down the ladder I could get the stuff pretty well cleaned out but the big consideration was Christmas every Christmas we have to take down about 10 boxes we have to unpack them put up all the Christmas deer I put the boxes back up in the attic and then about a month later bring the boxes back down pack them back up with all the stuff from Christmas and send them back up into the Attic that alone was a great reason for having an efficient way to transport stuff from the garage back up to the Attic the other thing was the Christmas decorations alone were not much weight and I had no concerns about overloading the trusses from the on the garage full disclosure I got most of the ideas for the attic elevator from YouTube videos the first one dealt with setting up a system with garage hardware garage door hardware and hooking it up to a harbor freight hoist motor which had the capacity to lift about 400 pounds now I never had any intention of putting anywhere close to 400 pounds on this elevator so I knew that the design was more than capable of handling what I needed to do I got two videos in particular one of them that talked about how to hook up the hoist from Harbor Freight to garage door hardware and suspending it from a 4x4 up in the rafters the second video dealt with how to build a platform that one would go back up into a hole that was big enough to accommodate with a little bit of play the platform itself but that design left 2 to 3 inches around the perimeter of the platform and there would be a lot of heat coming down in the summer and a lot of cold coming down in the winter the second video that I looked at was particularly useful in that it gave me the ability to seal up that opening once the platform was up in the hole I'll show you both of these and I'll start off by giving you a good view and overview of how I designed the platform this is the platform I built it so that it can be suspended from cables that run up into the attic and are attached to the standard garage door hardware I'll show that to you in a moment the thing that's interesting about the platform is one the platform itself from here to the other side is about two inches to three inches smaller than the opening that I cut in the garage ceiling I did this to make sure that I wouldn't have the platform bind on the ceiling as it moved up into the opening and to help ensure that it properly positions itself I built these alignment blocks on all corners of the platform so that as the platform moves into position it's almost always a little out of position because it's wings that these alignment blocks will help position it correctly in the hole but you can see by the dimensions on either side of the alignment blocks it's going to allow me about an inch and a half on either side which was the opening that I've talked about a couple of different times that we're gonna that was going to allow air to pass from the from the attic into the garage I solved that problem with a plateau platform that's suspended below the actual support platform and it's really nothing more than an oversized piece of hollow core door which is suspended to the bottom of the lift platform with Springs connected with I bolts and what this allows is as the platform moves into the opening in the ceiling the halle core door seals the opening and I can make sure that it's sealed all the way around by lifting it until I feel tension on the springs and there are springs all around the perimeter of the platform that allows me to get good support and good closure when I lift the lift platform into the opening this is the hardware that runs the elevator first you see the Harbor Freight motor which has been connected to standard garage door hardware you can see the motor is connected to a shaft which runs over the opening it's connected to a four by four with standard garage mounting hardware and there are two standard garage door take-up spools one on either side of the opening the motor is controlled by this remote which I have positioned here and I can raise or lower the platform to raise the platform I simply push the up button on the remote and bring the platform into the opening in the ceiling you could see that as I brought the platform into the opening I had to slowly move it up to make sure it was correctly positioned and that the positioning blocks had time to align the platform in the hole I gave it a couple of additional bumps to make sure that the hollow core door would seal the opening and that there would be no air leaks in the in the opening as you can see you can load it up pretty well this number of articles although they're not heavy would take multiple trips up into the attic and these are easy if you had boxes the size of a standard packing container and I have about ten of them at Christmas time you can see that it would not only be a number of trips but it would also be difficult and dangerous getting them up and down the ladder that I use to access the Attic well that's the attic elevator it was a fun project and I was able to do it for under about two hundred dollars a residential system comparable of that would cost about $3,000 so it was a good investment good investment of my time it'll be an excellent resource in the future it'll make getting things into and out of the Attic much easier and much safer and I'm really glad I undertook the project thanks for watching you

Channel: Jim Brusseau

Views: 21,524

Rating: 4.852459 out of 5

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Id: 2p0cLZQiM30

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020