Ups and downs in the workshop

摘要

An old back injury restricts me to a maximum 5kg lift. Both chucks on my newly acquired lathe exceed that - in fact the 8" four jaw with back plate is far too heavy for me to lift safely at 15.5 kg, so a solution needed to be found and I decided to rig up a chuck hoist. I emphasise "chuck" as I do not intend the hoist will be lifting anything heavier than the four jaw chuck.An overhead hoist affixed to the ceiling was out of the question as the timber ceiling/roof in my workshop (which is a 16'X9' timber built garden studio), is not strong enough to support any sort of serious weight so I have constructed a hoist where the weight bears partly on the floor and partly against a bench, photo 1. A small budget electric winch from a well known online auction site will be doing the raising and lowering.The hoist utilises a length of old steel scaffold pole provided by my builder neighbour. He gave me the pole and I gave him my shoes! (I had just bought a pair of steel toecap shoes from a car boot sale which turned out to be too small for me.) They didn't fit me - but they fitted him. He was happy and so was I.