Quote:
Originally Posted by LUV2XCLR8
Man that is very cool, how much you got in it?
How does it attach at the front exactly? (Pic)
Where did you get all of the supplies?
Do you have that all on paper?
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The front attachment point is a carribeaner (sp?) attached to a small section of chain that I bolt between the two front holddowns in the top (the ones above the rearview mirror). If the top was nicer (or in v.3 of the design) I might do something more clever that would not potentially chip or damage that part of the top (the chain links kind of abrate the fiberglass). Basically though, the top is lifted by a single point in the front and the dual ropes in the back.
Supplies are cheap and really common. About 18" of chain at each end (used to give me some adjustment capability to do final "leveling" of top) some decent load rating nylon rope, and some bulk pulleys from the local OSH / Home Depot type place. The ratcheting crank may have been a Harbor Freight thing, I dont really recall....but it came with the strap included. It was probably a $20 item, if even that much.
All tolled, it's probably less than $40 in materials....the only real gotchas were the first time around when I put the pulleys in single-shear and the bolts tweaked HARD and looked like they would break off.
The second item was setting the crank too high on the wall.....the lower the crank is, the greater the amount of lift you get with the strap and crank assy. Pretty easy to figure out, once you're sensitive to the issue.
The final annoyance is that if you don't keep some weight on the ropes up front (the non-2x4 end) the rope tends to fall off the pulley and get wedged into the assembly. Adding a couple pounds of weight at the end of the rope would keep it under enough tension even when the top was not in the fixture. You can see in one of the photos, I simply added a small 5 Lb dumbell plate to deal with that. Not elegant.....but again I was only on version 2 of the design.
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