executing on a nutty idea...

hi all,

as it turns out, i do seem to have too much thinking time on my hands. (i'm a manager for a big co, so my actual job task is "deleting email" more so than anything else...)

recall I talked about racking a H16 on a truck, so that I could pull my travel trailer... well, so, i learned how to weld, and got the truck rack pretty much finished. as of February, i'm no longer paying for a storage facility... yes, i also completed my mcguyver contraption to store the H16 up against the ceiling of my garage. I'll have to take some pics to post, but after doing some research on boat lifts which seem common place on cold lakes that freeze, where owners of boats with boat houses have a hoist system, my design pretty much followed suit. the out of the box systems for sale seemed to range in the $3k and up and were rated for insane weights, so I figured my plans would be ok.

my total cost for materials was under $200, the biggest single ticket being a $135 winch form harbor freight. that plus the 3/16 cable, garage door pullies, 1" black pipe, eye bolts and misc lag screws yielded the functional equivalent of the $3k+ system. After a first attempt of using a genie screw drive 1/2 hp garage door opener, which spun the black pipe at a terrifying speed, proved to be incapable of coiling a mere 40 lbs, so that was packed and returned to lowes for full credit. gotta love lowes. the 1500 lbs AC winch is painfully slow, but that has it's positives as well (no loud crashing noises so far).

A slight adjustment was needed to the stop point of the garage door opener, as the hulls are a just touching the door when it is fully opened, with about 3.5 feet of the bow hanging over the opened door.

Next task will be the build of a set of beach wheels and loading rig as the garage door height being standard is not enough to load the boat onto the truck rack while in the garage. making the door arch higher is one remodel job i'm not going to do...

like i said, if it's worth doing, it's worth over doing. my 11 year old son thinks i'm crazy, saying i always manage to find ways to over complicate the simplest of ideas.

so now i have a 15.5 ft canoe and H16 hanging from my garage ceiling, and have moved on to the next project which is building a murphy bed for the guest room (which i'm guessing i'll be a resident of in the not so distant future).

I'll post some pics...