How to build a small elevator

today on the dirty shop we are going to build an elevator lift for my grandpa who's our great grandpa i guess uh who is uh having a little trouble getting up and down the stairs so we're building this warning this video may contain scenes of extreme untidiness viewer discretion is advised so the first thing i got for this project i had to order a bunch of pieces and wait for them to show up in the mail so that i could build this thing and i ordered some of these roller pieces that go in this super strike because i'm going to use this super strut as the vertical uh guidance on my my elevator platform and then these rollers will give it something nice and smooth to roll on and these fit nicely in the tracks here and so to see how that works i've got one sitting here just like that so you can see it fits in the track and rolls quite nicely and they're pretty darn sturdy they've got three half inch bolt holes in them which is you know 10 times as much shear as the super strut could handle so not too worried about that so these will be my vertical guidance now i just got to build i'm going to build an arch arrangement that will attach bolts to these and i'm going to build a platform on the bottom of that with some rails around it and that should be my elevator and then we're going to attach that inside the shop so i got to go and cut out the parts for this frame and get back here and weld them together i went over to the place where i need to install this and i got measurements for everything because it's fairly far away i'm not able to go back so i took a ton of pictures got measurements so that i could get this right hopefully i'm always kind of a hopeful guy but i've got my two uprights cut six and a half feet long and i need to drill some holes in them to attach these rails so i'll do that first and then i think i need to go about 36 inches between my rails so that there's plenty of room to stand there and then i'll probably go out about 30 inches because there's going to be leverage out because the rails are going to be like that going up and down and there's going to be a platform and since the lift is going to be on top of here it's going to have some leverage doing this so i don't want to make this too long but of course it has to have room to be able to get on it and be have space so uh i'll have to see how it looks as i go along never built one of these before it's always a bit of a chop and change and and figure out things as they go but the first thing i do is i'm going to drill holes in these pipes so that they'll bolt up to my rails and then i'll figure out the width that i want these to be okay i've got my part rigged up in the machine here i'm going to drill these holes of course if you're doing this you could drill these by hand these are not accurate holes at all um it's not super critical but i've got a super you know i've got a mill a super drill press on steroids so i'm going to use this but i only want to use two of these bolt holes in each of these three is overkill one is overkill really but two is what i'm going to use and these holes are approximately half an inch my calipers now to find the distance between holes like this you measure the whole width the whole diameter right here and this is 0.56 so i'm going to take my calculator here turn it on so i'm going to go 0.56 and i'm going to add it to the distance between the holes here so i'm going outside to outside hole here so i'm just going to add that i'm going to measure that and that's 0.31 or 1.31 1.31 and the distance between those two holes centered to center is 1.87 inches so one and seven eighths basically between those holes so we'll go 1.87 and i've already set my zeros here so i'm going to move my x to two inches where i want my first hole to start and it y minus one point oh oops minus point seven five and that should move to where the first hole is going to be we jog that down and that looks about right for my first hole so that's going to go right there and the platform is going to go off in that direction or whatever so i'm going to do those two holes and then i'm going to get the other part and put it in here and then i'll figure out where i'm going to put them on the upper portion [Music] so well i've got these welded together now so i've got my my upright frame my my lift is going to attach right here my hoist to haul this up and down and i've got it laid out in the tracks here bolted together to see how it tracks and make sure my my legs are parallel i measured them and everything but i'm paranoid and i check things a lot so to make sure that things are lining up because it's really hard to go back and unweld something so i what i'm watching for when i slide this back and forth is for these outer legs these these main uprights just to go in and out like this right so if the ends are expanding and contracting as i slide it back and forth that means that these are tapered or that there's some angle in my legs and they're not moving at all which is perfect so that means i'm tracking straight up and down at least good enough for what i'm doing and i can move on to the next step okay so we're moving right along this project it's going really well which is great um i'm using some scrap material now i only bought enough of this bigger stuff to do these uprights and the crossbars there in the top piece so uh i'd like to have some more for this railing i probably should have bought it but i had some scraps so it's good i've got this uh one inch by two inch that's going to go here is the hand rails and then i'm going to use this one inch angle iron right here on the corner to tie it together and then i'm going to put a cross tie here out of this one inch by 8 inch strap it just goes all the way down to kind of kind of bind it all together i decided to make these pretty high so that if the person standing in here because i am building it for a person were to slip and fall then it would support them fairly high up on their body because in reality a railing could be a little lower it wouldn't be a problem for most people so i went with 42 inches i was trying to find a good good good height and 42 seemed like the answer so i put 42 uh there i'm going to weld these on i'm going to put these right here and then all i have to do is well i've still got a few things to do start with that and we'll see how it goes the next step in case you ever needed to do so a table saw will cut aluminum but it's horribly noisy so just consider that when you're doing it make sure to wear appropriate earplugs it also tends to throw chips at you which can hurt pretty bad so that also is something you need to be aware of this diamond plate is a quarter inch thick and because of the way i made mine my part i just need to cut a 32 inch wide piece off of it and i'll be good to go so i'm gonna cut this and i shouldn't have much left to do anything painting now if you remember when i drilled these or when i did these bottom bars i drilled holes in them i used a number seven bit which is the right size for a quarter twenty tap and i plan on tapping these once i've used them as guide holes and so i'm going to put this quarter inch plate up here and then i'm going to use these holes that i drilled as guide holes and then i'm going to read and then i'll tap these later and i'll drill these back out to a quarter inch it's a little bit kind of a roundabout way to do it but it works pretty well for something like this so i'm going to go through and drill a couple of these with these number eights uh number sevens i mean and then uh we'll get them all bolted together with quarter 20s and have this bottom plate secured i've i've got a bunch more of these uh number seven drill bits and i'm just going to after i've drilled the first hole there i'm just going to put that in there and to work as kind of a guide so that i could drill the next couple of them and they'll be still aligned now that i've got all this assembled i've got my lift here came in the mail and i picked it up on amazon obviously you can see from the box what it is but in in american terms it said it was 440 or doubled its 880 pound lift so and i plan on doubling it what i'm doing and when you get one of these hoists you got to make sure that you get um for a house use here you need to make sure you get one that has a 120 volt motor on it most of the ones you see are our car winches and they're 12 volts and i'm sure you get a converter but why bother the nice thing about this one too is it's got this automatic cut off right so the lift will lift up to this point and shut the lift off so i'm going to make myself a part that goes on this cable and then we could adjust the height of that and wherever it lines up level with the floor we want this to line up to then it'll i'll set the the uh the shutoff to shut off at that point so this is going to go up on top of my lift here i'm going to bolt it on we'll see how it looks there we go sweet we're pretty close to ready all righty i've been a couple days and went out to did some camping over the weekend and now i've got to get the last bit of this on here and then i can uh spray paint it and we'll go install it so i'm making a rail for the back of this i just wanted to swing up and down and have a catch on one end so i've taken a bar and i've drilled this is just three-quarter inch conduit and i've drilled a three-eighths hole in each end but 90 degrees off each other so there's one there and one there and if you want to see how to do this i'll give you a link to a video uh how to drill holes in a pipe it's really simple uh tool for drilling aligned holes or or angled holes in a pipe like this so that you get them actually 90 degrees off but what i'm going to do here is i'm going to put a quarter inch bolt in this side and put that on there and i've drilled and tapped the hole right there for that and this this quarter inch bolt is plenty strong for what i want to do it's just a safety rail and this will allow it to uh have a little bit of movement here then on this end since i've got my 3 8 hole pointing up now i'm going to put a bar that sticks down here and you can just set this down on that bar so you'll be able to lift it off of there and let it go it'll swing down and then you'll be able to bring it back up and set it on there and you'll see what i'm talking about after i get this bar made and welded on i forgot that i was gonna have to do some welding today so i'm wearing a t-shirt and shorts and sandals which is not unusual for me to weld in t-shirts and shorts and sandals except that this welding is up tall where it can fall on my feet normally i can cover my legs and i'm good but this could be interesting so here we go let me cover my feet [Music] sweet now all i have to do is clean it up paint it go install it these rollers that i got with this thing or that i got for this elevator they have this bar down the middle of them right here you can see and it sticks down too far so i actually took it and milled a little bit of that off so that i'd have more space in between them because otherwise there's no way to attach these rails on the wall which seems like a kind of a design flaw to me but i cut it up enough so that i can get a wood screw or the small screw head underneath it so i'm going along these rails and drilling holes that i could put use wood screws to attach because these are going to go into a two by four anyways or two by six for the verticals and you'll see how that goes when we get there but it's until then i've got to drill holes for my wood screws in this board in this rail [Music] last step before i go and install this is to paint it i just i'm not a paint expert but uh i'm just gonna use some spray paint and i went up and picked up a couple of these paint plus primers from uh from ace i've used it before it works pretty good and solid and i've gotta spray the bottom of it and flip it up and then do all the sides so hopefully this will work out for me and i can move on to the next uh install tomorrow i'm gonna wear my cool mask that i made for my coronavirus safety setup and it should be good enough so cool so we're going to put the elevator right in here and it's going to rise up the elevator is going to come up to this bottom step right here so we can walk on right there raise it up and get on right there so we're putting all those parts out and then we're going to install it [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] okay so we have our finished elevator here it's in the down position it's got a nice little rail here to put up hooks on right there so they don't fall out and we can go and take a ride in so we got our switch put our safety rail up there we got our switch here on the rail i would like to make a strap but that's better than this duct tape but it works [Music] it's got an automatic stop right there you can see down here we've got this nice flat board that steps down there and then the desk attached to this little rope here and this can go up so you can use the stairs try to do this one-handed there you go so there that's in the up position so when you come out you can put this down sits nicely leave that hanging there and then we go back down the stairs oh and there we go [Applause] perfect so there you go that was my elevator build video i had a couple little autofocus issues with this new camera i'm using i'm working on that hopefully won't happen in the future gotta learn a new game uh it ended up a little longer of a video than i intended because i wanted to be clear the uh as possible the items i was using and the way i was building this project so that if you wanted to build something similar in the future you could maybe get some hints and tips for your project and have an idea of the kind of things you might need to use to build it mine worked very well it everything kind of came out as i expected the only real little issue that i had with the whole project which is pretty rare to only have one problem is that when i uh when the cable winds up the cable strands have a tendency to roll over each other and then they when they drop off of those of each other they tend to maybe shudder a little bit in the elevator and make a kind of a clunking sound which i don't really like i'm going to try greasing the cables and see if that uh maybe smoothes it out a little bit but otherwise it all worked really well and i was pretty happy with this project it was pretty cool i've never done anything like this before and it worked great so i can't complain there for those of you who are subscribed to my channel already i really appreciate it for those of you who haven't if you like what i'm doing maybe hit that subscribe button maybe hit that like button give me a thumbs up helps me show up better on youtube and it just makes me feel good and i do really appreciate it until the next time thank you for watching the dirty shop

Channel: Dirty Shop DIY

Views: 102,862

Rating: 4.8974972 out of 5

Keywords: DIY, elevator, lift, hoist, shop, celing, tutorial, build, how, to, Awesome, best

Id: XQa8YYRrtDI

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020