Installing an Electric Hoist from Harbor Freight in my Garage using Unistrut, Shop Crane Gantry!

not very long ago I built this track mounted ceiling hoist in my shop and it has proven to be extremely useful the shop is about 25 feet wide and I only used one track above the bay that I thought I would use it most I stopped right here at the attic entrance and as you can see the other bay does not have any more track if you haven't seen that video I Really encourage you to take a look at it and watch it all the way through that way you can see what I was thinking when I mounted this hoist and what my thought processes were now unfortunately the last couple of times I've worked out here in the shop I really needed to move a heavy object over to this workbench that sits in this particular Bay because you're limited to the structural Integrity of your ceiling basically this particular ceiling is not designed to hold any weight or lift any weight I really didn't want to put a massive hoist in the shop so what I came up with was using a piece of Unistrut upside down Laying across a bunch of trusses that way when you're using the Hoist you're actually sharing some of that load across more than one truss the Hoist that I'm using is just a Harbor Freight hoist it is one of their smaller ones that only supports 440 pounds but quite frankly I don't ever have the need to lift that much weight nor would I put that much stress on my trusses all of that being said I have lifted myself with this hoist I weigh 250 pounds and I did not notice any Flex in the ceiling at all so back to the problem at hand I can't move things out of this Bay into this Bay so I definitely need to extend the track however I cannot just simply extend this track because it would go right in the way of the attic access door so I need to move the track back at least a foot or two so it goes behind the door but then that puts the whole system a little bit closer to the back end of the shop and sometimes I really need this thing a little further towards the center of the shop after I posted videos of this crane and how I put it together I had a really smart viewer of mine that posted an idea and that is stuck in the corner of my mind for the last three months his suggestion was rather brilliant basically he said take two tracks and mount them permanently to the ceiling like this in parallel and then take another track and run it this way make sure these are on rollers and these are on rollers and then Mount Your crane right here also on rollers which would mean you could run this crane anywhere within this track and be able to use it and it should work just fine so with a little video editing magic I'm going to show you the aftermath basically we took the original Rail and we moved it this way about a foot and a half so it would clear the attic entrance I mounted another rail on this side and both of those rails go all the way across the shop now so instead of using another additional single unit track across the bottom I was afraid it would make it hang too low I decided to cradle it in between two more pieces of unitrack and this allowed me to take the Hoist and get it a little closer to the ceiling so it's not hanging down so low to make the carrier that the Hoist is in I just had some scrap steel laying around the shop it looked to be a little thicker than 1 8 it is a diamond check plate not that I really cared it's just what I had I cut it up using the east wood metal cutting saw and I took it over to my 20 ton Harbor Freight shop press in that shot press is a swag off-road finger press and it made it really easy to bend this the way I needed it the total span is six feet and there was a little bit of bounce when I was hanging on just one beam so what I did is I welded another one upside down it's actually only five feet long and this allowed me to hang from one beam and it didn't Flex hardly at all and then adding the second one on the other side just gives you that much more strength of course we have two different ways of motion we can go back and forth across the carrier but we can also drag the whole thing across the shop so a few things to consider is the track across the ceiling needs to be in parallel and measured precisely I use the string line it really wasn't that big of a deal but if you get any of them a little crooked or a little off the carrier is going to bind up the carrier is also hanging from rollers I will put a link to all the parts and pieces Down Below in case you're curious what I used another thing worth mentioning is these hangers are extremely expensive I was actually able to find some on eBay that were are used for not a lot of money I bought basically a bucket of them and it wasn't a whole lot unfortunately to buy them new they're kind of pricey but again I'll put a link down below so at least you know what to look for unfortunately you have to use the hangers because if you put any kind of Bolt underneath at all it gets in the way of the wheels and the unitrack or Unistrut whatever brand you're buying you could pretty much buy from any big box store I bought mine from Menards so there you have it my quick and dirty upgrade of the new shop hoist that I have in my shop as you can see I'm lifting the engine there that engine weighs about 350 pounds and it's having no problem at all if you like these types of videos don't forget to like And subscribe take a look at some of my other videos at the very least you might be entertained

Channel: 1D10CRACY

Views: 175,898

Keywords: electric hoist, shop crane, gantry, diy gantry, plywood mover, so happy, trolley, saving my back, workshop crane, work shop, camera boom

Id: 3wu_U7Lblh4

Length: 4min 34sec (274 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023