Car lift in the garage

When I bought a used passenger car and started repairing it, my first helper in the garage became… a hoist I built under the ceiling. Without it I would hardly have managed, for example, such a difficult operation to do alone as replacing the engine.

Figure 1 shows the hoist placement in the garage — right above the car hood. With a boom slightly over a meter long, my crane has a working area of about 5 m². That is quite enough to remove heavy units and assemblies from the car and put them back during maintenance or repair.

Fig. 1. Hoist in the garage:
1 — ceiling, 2 — M16 bolts (4 pcs.), 3 — boom, 4 — cargo winch.

I made the crane to an inverted brace layout (fig. 2): an L-shaped boom cantilever with a cargo winch is mounted on a vertical shaft.

I turned the shaft from a steel blank Ø 80 mm, welded it into a base — a steel plate 400 X 400 X 25 mm — and fastened it to the ceiling with four through bolts M16. The ceiling slabs in my garage slope toward the entrance, so to keep the base horizontal I placed several washers under the long bolts.

I welded the boom from a one-meter brace, two angles 50 X 50 mm and a cup. I pressed two bronze bushings into the latter; they serve as sliding bearings. On the shaft the whole assembly is retained by a cottered shaped nut M42 X 2.0.

For a cargo winch I could have used a hand chain hoist or a factory-made block and tackle. However I built the winch myself (fig. 3) — from a mechanism meant for adjusting pneumatic brakes on trucks (with a ratchet).

I bored the central hole of the worm wheel for a rope drum — a pipe section Ø 42 and 150 mm long; I welded in this pipe. Then I fitted flanges — rings Ø 80 and 5 mm thick. I attached the drive handle to the ratchet’s primary shaft.

In both drum halves I drilled holes for the ends of a steel rope Ø 4 mm and hung a single-groove pulley with a cargo hook on it. If you turn the handle, the drum winds the rope and lifts the load on the hook to the required height.

I fitted the winch built this way with a four-wheel trolley. It consists of two bent cheeks with pins; bearings No. 204 with wheels pressed onto them are fitted on the pins. The wheels are retained on the pins by spring retaining rings.

The trolley runs on the horizontal shelves of the angles, and a stop bolt with thrust bushings at the end of the boom keeps it from jumping off.

“M-K” 2’87, A. LAZAREV