This video shows a project I worked on for hoisting and storing a canoe in the garage. I have also shown some basic physics calculations which show why this design works well. Hope you enjoy, thanks
Great post... I made a hoist system for my kayak with the same pulley set up as you have. I had an old boat winch that I installed to lift the whole system. It works great!... Thanks for the post!
Thanks for taking the time and effort to share your design and a little physics along the way. I would offer one suggestion that will help with access to the other items in your garage. I noticed that you complicated access to your bicycle by routing the line straight to the cleat from the nearest pulley. You could avoid this by routing your line through an additional pulley mounted to the rafter directly above the cleat. While this adds a little resistance to the complete system, it will route the line between your bicycle and the wall.
I followed your design and hoisted my 17' Pelican tight to the ceiling! I initially gapped the mounts by one truss (24") but had to reduce that to 6" on the same truss to overcome angular increase in force required at full height. U rock dood!
I was using a pair of blocks each with 4 pulleys, trying to reduce the effort required to pull my boat onto my car's roof racks (via a ramp). I used a digital luggage scale to see how much force I was needing to use before the boat would move. What I found was that the friction in each cheap pulley was significant. In the end I used less pulleys (2 at one end and one at the other) but they had ball bearings on the axels. It made a massive difference. It was much easier to lift using the 3x ratio than the 7x ratio, just because it had much less friction!
Thank you for making this video, it provided me with the proper information to make my own hoisting system. I also have a canoe that is taking too much space in my garage.
Great video. Want I mean to say in my last post is that if you used pulleys with ball bearings the lower friction may result in the canoe staying more level on the way up and down.
Thanks for the math, too. Boat rope holder called a "cleat". Good, too, to have an additional pully up the wall to avoid diagonal line and a better hold for the cleat. Great informative video, though.
nice video, heres a tip, when you tie the rope to the cleat, put a twist in it and hook it around the cleat after going around a few times and that will prevent it from slipping whithout having to have a knot
Nice system and I am going to make one. Right now I raised canoe (about 75lbs) one end at the time use a 4:1 pulley assembly called boom vang in a sailboat. Btw, tie a cleat hitch at rope end will look much nice and simple.
Cool. Pushing down the end of the canoe that rises faster will limit how high you can get it in a tall garage because of your reach, but you can tie a piece of rope so it dangles down from the wood support at that end of the canoe and pull the rope down rather than push the end of the canoe down. There are ways to keep a mechanical advantage of four without one end climbing higher, but they all involve using more pulleys or they involve more complicated block and tackle devices and probably aren't worth the trouble.
The reason for one end rising faster than the other is because of the friction and mass of the pulleys. In High School physics classes you usually simplify these types of problems by assuming the pulleys are frictionless and massless. In the real world they aren't, but perhaps if I had purchased better quality pulleys the impact would have been less.
I just installed a hoist system yesterday that I bought on Amazon a few days ago It was inexpensive, $53 Canadian dollars, and has two independent pulley systems, one for each end of my kayak. Each system has a mechanical advantage of 2, and comprises of one fixed pulley, one free pulley (that can go up or down) and a rope that's fixed at one end. It works pretty well, and you can pull the two ropes simultaneously (the resulting mechanical advantage is still 2). I might add another fixed pulley between the two systems and use one long rope through both systems instead. If I do, I'll have the same type of system as yours, with and ideal MA of 4. I guess the manufacturer didn't include this extra fixed pulley because a mechanical advantage of 2 is good enough, and because the two ends of the kayak will rise at the same rate, and maybe the extra friction from an additional fixed pulley would defeat any gain in M.A. I just wish my garage was a bit taller so I could drop the kayak right onto the roof of my car using the pulley hoist! Thanks for posting.
Awesome! Great video that helped me out. But, (since I have a higher ceiling) I think I could do the same, but with less pulleys. 1 rope split into two, going to each end of my kayak, then going up to 1 pulley directly above my kayak, then transferring over to another pulley on the wall. So basically 1 rope, 2 pulleys, and the rope split into 2 at the very end for the kayak. Would save me 1 pulley I think.
You have a 2:1 mechanical advantage. I made a design for nearly the same thing, with a 3:1 ratio with a double pulley at the top. Unfortunately my system appears to have so much friction I can’t pull it up at all.
I patterned my system similar to your original design except I ran the rope to a corner using a trailer winch to raise and lower my canoe with cleats on the cross board sandwiching the inverted gunnels so it will not shift or slip. I used the same design for my 4 kayaks hanging them with the sides vertical rather than flat. Takes a little longer to lift but one person can lift and lower all watercraft on a level plane and easily. Another advantage is I can stop at any level if needed and the lowering is very controlled.
You could use a loop in a simple knot, so when you want to un-tie the rope, just pull on the end of the rope and pull out the loop. Knot undone! I use that method all the time when tying loads onto a trailer. To keep it from failing while driving, I then tie the loop around the tensioned rope in one more simple knot, and Voila! Ready to roll!
cattail3 The distance between attach points will depend on the length of the canoe your are hoisting. In my case, I was upgrading an existing system, so I just stayed with the same rafters that were already being used.
cattail3 You should position them so that the load is equally balanced. For example, if the stern is heavier than the bow, the rope at the back should be further from the stern than the front rope is from bow. Also, with a boat like that, since there is no curvature, I would think you'd want hangers for it which are more complex than what I used. Best of luck with the project, let me know how it turns out!
I looks like the canoe is unbalanced from the start. If the hoists were spaced equal distance from each end of the canoe they should be lifting equal weight and should rise at the same rate. You might try fish scales to know if each pulley is actually lifting equal weight, and if the front should be heavier to rise evenly.
