Stairs Solution - Winch

[Andydn]

Yeah the stairs are really beginning to put me off the whole hobby. Next house must have a decent sized ground level space for things like that.

Not putting me off the hobby but I have to remove the back box when I buy/sell machines (depending on where they are going as they’re spread out). Now I’m picking wisely but getting my garage door widened as that’ll be my ‘pin swap out’ room!


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[Fifty]

@Rob zombie I have the exact same issue at my place. 13 stairs down to the basement. I'm able to get pins into my garage, and using a tiny ramp I built, also into the house. I was graced/cursed with a body that has been 70KG since grade 9. I'm 46 now and that 70KG doesn't really help me much when man-handling a pin on truck. I was going to go with a ceiling mounted winch, but the cost was too high for how often I moved pins up and down the stairs. I needed a cheaper solution, and that's when I realized that a winch is just a way of taking mechanical advantage over something you want to lift.

So, armed with that knowledge I started thinking about using pulleys and how I would mount them. I ended up cutting a hole in the ceiling at the top of my stairs, then I took a piece of 1" x 1" hollow steel and drilled a couple holes in it. I added eyelets, and then the pulleys. Two at the top of the stairs and two attached to the hand cart. An Amazon order and 100' of climbing rope later and voila! I had a pulley system I could lift pins with! There are two double pulleys at the top, and two attached to the hand cart. So this gives me a mechanical advantage of 8:1 or in other words it makes a 200KG pin weigh 25KG. My wife can now lift the pin into the air, and then slowly bring it down while I guide things. As long as she doesn't let go (I'm not insured) everything should be fine.

Here's a few photos of my ceiling. I have a piece of wood painted to match so that I can cover the hole when not in use. I hung one of the double pulleys on it so you could see what it looked like. The square steel bar is wedged between two floor joists and I cut U shaped brackets to keep it from shift about. The pulleys and eyelets were cheap, the most expensive part of this system was the climbing rope as I didn't want to cheap out on it.