The Tool Every Shop Needs!!! Installing Unistrut Trolly Winch

[Applause] [Music] how's it going everybody I don't think I've ever been more excited for a project in my life in this box is the solution to a problem that I've had for a very long time every once in a while I have finished building something and it usually ends up on this assembly table and I need to find a way of picking it up and moving it either off of the table or over to the garage door so that I can move it out of the shop and that's always been the issue I also am going to have an issue soon where I'm drawing some massive Oak slabs and I can't move them by hand so I need a way of bringing them in the opposite direction as well so I can place them here and work them with smaller tools because they're not going to fit on my table saw anyway so it might as well be here right now I was talking to Hunt's workshop and if you haven't seen him yet he's another YouTuber on here go check out his channel I'll be putting a link to him in the description because he let me on to this little beauty which I think I might be the only person in the world that didn't know that these existed but you can buy a winch that can hold up to 800 pounds and it just plugs into a 110 and it comes with this little with a little control box and it's perfect it's all I really need for working around the shop so I oh so I got that and I also got a track system so that I can lift the winch into the air roll it that way and roll back you'll see how it works as I'm building it so the first thing we got to do is reinforce the ceiling it's very important that you don't just place this on a single stud you have to reinforce it first so we're going to get started on that keep in mind every single structure is going to be different and I'm not telling you how to reinforce your structure but I will show you what I did with mine I got three of these two by fours to act as my extra support and then I also got this 12 foot 2x4 to act as the runner that The Trolley system is going to be hanging off of I started out by marking the approximate path I wanted the trolley to take now what I'm using today is called the uni strut system I'm going to be leaving a link in the description to a series of PDFs that you can read up on if you want to figure out how the manufacturer wants you to set these up ideally what you'd be using is a bunch of these brackets and the proper Fasteners I personally didn't go this route because it was going to end up costing more money in the long run but I would advise at least reading through the PDFs a little bit so that you know what you're looking at one of the biggest pieces that I skipped when making this is this bracket system instead of using this bracket I decided to just screw everything directly to my framing but it's important to know that the manufacturers want you to do this slightly differently than what I did here I'm just showing you what I did not what you should be doing to figure out where I wanted my framing up an attic I put three screws in where I wanted the track to run and then I could take all of my framing upstairs so that I can start putting it in place once I found the reference screws I could pull the insulation out and then start putting the 2x4 in place even though the track is only 10 feet long I decided to get this 12 foot 2x4 so that I didn't have to find the ends of the 2x4 or be limited by my spacing once the 2x4 was in place I could put the insulation back by cutting it and forming it around the 2x4 I already had these two by fours running down the middle of my attic and so that was the first one I was able to screw to and then I could take the other three two by fours and screw them in from the top what this does is it spreads out the weight amongst multiple trusses so that you're not overweighting a single Truss foreign [Music] I'm not filming that you'll have to use your imagination there was zero chance I was gonna be able to get the camera back there the next thing to do is to start putting the track in place I found that I could Jam a 1 by 4 8 foot board into the track and that would hold it in place while I screwed it in like I said before you really should be using the brackets that the manufacturer advises to do this but I just ended up using Fender washers and wood screws for my purposes that should work out just fine did it what now if you're interested at all in looking into the system go check out the links in the description the first set of links is going to be to the PDS that describe the system and all the different parts that you can use and then I'm also going to have a series of Amazon links to all of the products that I used and also to the brackets that I should have used [Music] are you kidding what are you serious they gave me one bolt that's a different size really [Music] come on these three were 12 and this one is yup a 14. all right I don't know what that boat was about but I don't expect to ever have to adjust it so it's not that big of a deal it worked just fine and I was so stoked once I got this thing up on the track now if you really like throwing your money away there are some rubber stoppers that you can buy for the Unistrut system that just bolt right in place but I just put a bunch of washers on a screw and that works just fine [Music] foreign [Music] and then once I knew everything was functioning properly I could throw a ton more screws in anywhere I saw fit this whole system is designed to hold about 800 pounds and so I threw in enough screws that I could match that weight capacity and of course as soon as I was done with the winch my daughters came home from soccer and wanted to help me test it out [Music] my back pull it back over here once we were done screwing around I had to figure out how I wanted the power cord run to this now this is something I'm not really sure is the final version in the system I just zip tied an extension cord to a nearby bracket and I considered that good enough for now if anyone has any ideas on how to improve this cord management system I'm all ears because I'm not really sure what I want here now the winch is rated for 400 pounds but you can increase that to 800 pounds if you use this provided hook Loop for some reason mine got really stuck and I had to hammer it into place but it works really well and of course I had to test it out one more time laughs [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh stop oh God freaking hurts whoa now one of the things that I was considering when I was building this is whether or not it was going to interfere with my garage door and one of the biggest concerns was was my garage door going to break something once everything was installed but it ended up just pushing it out of the way and that works perfectly for me the problem being is that anytime I do want to lift something into the shop I'm gonna have to leave the garage door part way down when I lift it but that's not really that big of a deal I could work around that but if you are planning on copying this system it's important to understand how it's going to interfere with the rest of the ecosystem of your shop for me one of the biggest considerations was just moving things from the entrance of my shop over to my work tables and then moving again from the work table over to the exit of the shop and since that's really all I needed this is going to work perfectly one of the coolest things about this system is you can really personalize it to how you want it set up there are a ton of videos here on YouTube talking about this Unistrut system so definitely go check those out as well by far one of my favorite things that people do with this uni stretch system is they will make an H pattern in their shop and that will allow them to move their winch around into two different dimensions the shop setups that some of these guys have are so sick so you definitely need to go check those out but I decided I wanted mine to be pretty simple because I didn't really need all that right now someday I would love to expand this [Music] check out Hunt's Workshop if you want to see links to any of the products I used in this video they're gonna be they're gonna be in the description thank you all for watching catch y'all next time ow [Music] thank you

Channel: Wylde Woodworks

Views: 72,108

Keywords: Happy Woodworking

Id: axb2Gk_0ouA

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2022