John Larson
Aluminum
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2004
- Location
- Baltimore, Maryland, USA
I've been regularly upgrading my mills and lathes, and have gotten to the point where the lathe chucks, mill vises, and work pieces are simply too heavy to lift. I had planned on using a forklift, but this has no finesse at all. So I built a jib crane with a post and wheels on the outside end that looks like an A-frame post. My experience with jib cranes in the past has been a bit negative; they're massive relative to their lifting capacity. I sold the ones I had. I've used A-frames a good bit, too, but they are a bit easy to tip over with bad results. Also, they tend to always be in the way when not in use. Which is why I've been using the forklift solution for the past 4-5 years. I didn't want to run the forklift in my heated shop this winter. My mixture of the two bad ideas seems to be a good idea. Just finsihed and tested it today. The outboard pole and wheels pivot toward the wall and are out of the way when not in use. The outboard and inboard poles carry the weight like an A-frame.