I've quickly discovered that being retired and working on my Jeep will result in me having to do a lot of stuff by myself. Don't get me wrong, retirement is great and I'm loving it.
I already posted how I used my engine hoist/cherry picker to lift my axles in position. But now I needed something to lift my gas tank/ skid plate . I will also use this for my center skid plate install when I get to that point.
I looked at transmission jacks and I wanted to get something with a lowered height around 2-1/2 to 3 feet. All the single stage transmission jacks I saw were about 4 ft. lowered height and the multi stage lifts were a little expensive. It would also add another piece of equipment to my shop which is already a little crowded.
So I thought of another modification to my engine hoist. Using the basic principle of some of the personnel lifts I've seen, which use a parallelogram type linkage to keep the bucket vertical.
So I proceeded to weld a few parts together and came up with a lift attachment that worked great to install my gas tank.
So now the gas tank is installed and I started the engine yesterday. No driving yet as the brakes have to be bled and the steering is not hooked up. I'm waiting on some new parts for this.
In this linkage, the opposite sides of the parallelogram will always be parallel to each other. In my case, the shape of the linkage doesn't matter. It's the 4 pivot points and the distance between them that is key here.
The vertical component that supported the tank when I lifted it, remains vertical even though the pivot points are not vertical. A line between these two pivot points would be parallel to a line drawn between two pivot on the opposite side of the parallelogram, which these points are fixed to the frame and do not move.
So it worked great and I'll be using it for other things too. Take a look at the pics.
I put a little dog leg in the lower link so it wouldn't bind up in the lowered position.
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