The problem that I am trying to solve: getting older and weaker. Since I don’t have a solution for the problem, I figure I can try to work smarter by designing and building something to reduce the impacts of the problem.
One impact is the challenge of lifting heavy things, such as chucks onto the spindle of the lathe or a vice or universal dividing head onto the table of a milling machine.
The tasks I’ve mentioned would require a crane with very fine levels of adjustment on the crane hook, especially when handling a chuck onto the threaded spindle of my big lathe. I already have an engine crane, and it is quite capable of lifting weights exceeding two tonnes. However, it has limited mobility when something is on the hook, due to the large footprint of its fold-out legs, and the small-diameter steel castor wheels do not lend themselves to fine movement when under load. An example of the engine crane is shown in Photo 1.
Since I don’t have a solution for the problem, I figure I can try to work smarter by designing and building something to reduce the impacts of the problem
I already have a pallet jack, and a number of my benches, my big lathe, and my big milling machine are able to be moved with a standard 2.5-tonne pallet jack. One thing that pallet jacks are designed for is their manoeuvrability even when fully loaded.
Improving on what I have seen
Some years ago I saw a web page article about someone grafting the mast and jib of an engine crane to the shortened base of a pallet jack to create a manoeuvrable crane. It looked like a good marriage of the benefits of both machines, but it had some limitations. One of the biggest limitations was that the modification was a permanent modification that prevented the pallet jack from being fully utilised for its original purpose.
My design makes the incorporation of the crane to the pallet jack a temporary attachment, that can be added or removed with minimal effort, with no modifications that affect the original purpose of the pallet jack. This design not only retains the functionality of the pallet jack
