First, a bit of a safety upgrade: we removed the field-expedient light switch from the old Famco drill press...

... and put on a slightly wider box, in order to fit a proper, modern easy-off power tool switch.

Much better! I think next I'll look into what it would take to replace that missing control lever knob. The lever is threaded at the end, but the thread, weirdly, doesn't match the two remaining knobs, which makes me think that entire lever got replaced at some point.

I think Dad thinks it's a little silly that I keep coming up with ideas for slowly restoring/updating the Famco, but, I mean, it's so cool. :)

Then, after a bunch of tool reorganization and whatnot that I didn't bother photographing, I went upstairs and made a small mod to the electric hoist we installed up there, namely...

... mixing up a little epoxy and gluing a small magnet (salvaged from, of all things, a small pencil sharpener) to the control box. Next time I'm up there, I'll take that electrical tape off, and then we'll be able to just stick the control box to the steel post instead of leaving it hanging there. It's the little things.

Speaking of the little things, here's what the lower level looked like toward the end of the day.

Nothing really profound to say about this; I just like how serene and relatively-tidy it is. Open floor, most of the random clutter from the long tile puzzle that was the move-in phase gone, populated shelves... it's nice. There's always more to do in such a shop (for instance, we could really use some better lighting--it looks fine in photos, but the old fluorescent lights in there are really kinda dim and yellow), but overall, I like where it's at right now.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

We finally got a liiiiift

It's a BendPak 10AP, if you're into that level of detail.

Dad has decided that we're going to install it ourselves. I have... well, "reservations" is probably too strong a word... let's go with "concerns". My role as unofficial OSHA guy seems like it may be about to become higher-priority.

Anyway, I thought about waiting to post about it until it was actually up, but it's too exciting. Right now I'm planning to go back Wednesday to help unpack it, get everything laid out, round up the tools... putting this thing together is going to be a campaign. It'll pay to plan ahead.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

This is the stuff that was packed in the box of smaller parts. Anchors, cables, hydraulic hoses, lots of hardware, and so forth.

These things are very heavy. Getting them off the trailer was a bit of a word problem. You can kind of see how we did it, with the cargo straps and the gantry; not shown are the chains we used to attach the other end. Those square steel frames at the bottom ends of the posts are part of the packaging for shipping and will be removed before they get stood up.

As an aside, I've watched several YouTube videos of this lift type being set up (BendPak often gives them to hot-rod and tuner YT channels as a sponsorship thing). These channels tend to be staffed by Fit Young Men, so in all that I've seen so far, the guy shooting the video is just like "hey Chris, Steve, gimme a hand with this" and they... stand the posts up, like it's an Amish barn raising. We will, eh, not be doing it that way. :)

I mean, I get why it's on there, but at the same time, that "FRAGILE" label is pretty funny on what is essentially a steel beam. :)

Mind you, they're not just steel beams, even as they come from the factory. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be installed, but they do come with the hydraulic rams and slides already mounted.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

One of the things I think was useful, right at the beginning, was this piece of information, which is obvious on its face and yet provides a helpful way of re-framing one's way of thinking about this stuff: With every other piece of industrial lifting equipment, the cardinal rule is you never go under the load. Uniquely, with a vehicle lift, the whole point is to go under the load. This makes it particularly important to keep one's wits about one while operating such a thing.

As an aside to this aside, I was in my father's office the day one of the guys on his crew was killed in a Going Under the Load accident. They were lifting one of the huge steel rollers that go in a paper machine, and the guy in question lost something out of his pocket as he was walking past. It was some trivial object, pack of cigarettes, lighter, something like that, but he instinctively lunged after it--at the exact moment that the crane failed and dropped the roller.

I didn't see it happen, but a man came running to get Dad, and there was a lot of yelling and running around outside after he left. He came back profoundly shaken, as you might imagine, and we took a different route than usual out of the building to get to the parking lot and go home. I would've been 12 or 13, I think. The guy never knew what hit him, and I've never forgotten the lesson. I expect I'll think of that day whenever I'm working out the lift plan for any given vehicle...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The top piece on this model of lift does a couple of things. The most obvious is that it removes the necessary hydraulic connection between the two posts from the floor, where earlier models of two-post lifts put it. This was easier to assemble, for obvious reasons, but it meant you had to have a big metal hump on the floor so that vehicles wouldn't crush the hoses while driving into position to be lifted. It's for this reason that the type with the connection at the top is advertised as the "clear floor" type.

It also ties the posts together at the top mechanically, which counteracts their natural tendency to deviate from being perfectly parallel under load. On the other hand, it now provides a thing at the top of the lift for the roof of the vehicle to potentially run into, but the makers thought of that. That padded bar hanging from the top structure is loosely attached and can swing if the vehicle is lifted into it. Once the electrical work is done, that will actuate a microswitch that shuts the lift down before damage can result. Neat!

The next order of business was to run the balancing cables, which connect the two lift heads together and make sure that they stay level with each other. You may remember from previous installments that these were coiled up at the top of the posts waiting for this phase. They could now be brought across and run down the opposite posts, where they connected to the lift heads not far from the origin points of their counterparts.

Left: the big threaded fitting at the far end of one cable. Center: that lift head's hydraulic ram. (The cardboard isn't really meant to stay there after shipping, but it's trapped under the clamps, which are important and we didn't want to disturb them by loosening them enough to get the cardboard out.) Right: the end of the other balancing cable, which is attached down inside the lift head, out of sight.

The threaded fitting is attached from underneath with a big ol' Nyloc nut:

Once the hydraulics are operational and the arms are attached, the final leveling will be done by adjusting this nut and its counterpart on the other side.

A small but important part that also needed to be crossed over and attached was this thin cable, which connects the safety interlock on the offside post to this lever, which is in turn directly attached to the safety lock on the power side post. This makes it possible for one person to operate both locks simultaneously, which has to be done to lower the lift.

(There is a lot of extra cable there. I'm not sure why, since this is with the lift assembled as wide as it can possibly be.)

To top off the day, we finished assembling the hydraulic hoses, which involved running a long one across the top, connecting a couple of intermediate fittings, and then connecting up the stouter hose that runs directly from the pump into the rest of the system. Oh, and hanging the pump on its bracket, which was trickier than it really needed to be, but very satisfying to have done.

The situation at the end of the day:

(cameo appearance by the old man, on his way to shut off the water)

Except for the arms, this is now pretty much mechanically complete. It's ready for the electrical work, after which it'll be time to tear down the staging, add fluid, and pressurize the system. The arms go on last, since they're easier to put on once you can raise the lift heads together.

Unfortunately, today was the last day we'll be able to work on it for a week or so—other stuff going on at both ends. Still, we're closing in on it, slowly but surely. It was very satisfying to get it into something visibly close to its final form today.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

BendPak did something rather clever with the installation manual: they didn't include enough information about the electrical part of the process for anyone without sufficient training as an electrician to do it themselves. Like, connecting the bit at the breaker box is simple, but exactly how the safety switch at the top of the assembly, the wiring provided with the control switch and motor, and the extra pieces that are required but not included (a manual and a thermal safety cutoff)--none of that is specified in enough detail to work with it if you don't Know A Thing Or Two™ about how that stuff works. I assume, from the bold and large-type reminders at this stage of the manual that a licensed electrician must be involved, that they did this on purpose. Probably for liability purposes, since these things are expected to be installed in commercial environments.

For our purposes, Dad was tempted to attempt it himself anyway (since in this state, you're not breaking any laws if you mess with the wiring on your own property, at your own risk), but good sense prevailed and he decided to heed the big print and hire a professional.

But, since those guys don't work cheap, he set out to get absolutely everything they weren't needed for in place before they arrive, so we spent a couple of afternoons putting up conduit and running some heavy-duty armored cable from the power unit to the box.

With that, everything is in place. Literally all the electrician should need to do is connect the correct wires to the correct places between the top microswitch and the power unit, add the two required switches, tie it all together, and connect it to the box (where the correct breaker is already present). Then we can tear down the staging, pressurize the hydraulic system, install the arms (which we could've done already, but it'll be much easier when we can use the hydraulics to raise the lift heads a bit), make one last check that everything is square and level, and... we're done. We'll have a working vehicle lift in the VAB.

Of course, we finished that up on December 22, so naturally that meant we had to wait out the holidays before we could book an electrician. He's scheduled to be there tomorrow morning; I'm heading down at the usual time, hopefully to get those last few steps done.

Exciting!

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The arms are on! (Which was harder than it looks. Those things are heavy, man.)

The lift is complete!

It's not quite 100 percent operational yet--our test runs indicate that the insides of the posts are not sufficiently greased yet, and the balancing cables still need a tiny bit of dialing in. But it's... let's say 97 percent complete. Sure, it took us probably six times as long as it has any of the young, beefy car dudes you'll see building them if you search on YouTube, but still! Somehow, a couple of broke-down old dudes built this thing all by themselves (with the aid of a couple hours of a licensed electrician's time), without any injuries and without breaking anything. I'd call that a definite win.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Heck yeah.

Here's a shot of how the arms are arranged to pick up this particular vehicle, if you're curious.

I was asked to provide video of the lift in operation, so, here you go. Interestingly, the lift takes almost exactly a minute to go all the way up.

That banging noise you hear is the spring-loaded safety locks passing each of the stops built into the posts, which are angled so the locks can slide past going up, but not coming back down. You can see Dad let it down slightly once it reaches the top, so that it's resting on the uppermost set of stops.

Please note that that license plate is a perfectly ordinary, randomly assigned Maine plate number, and not a vanity plate disclosing the number of experience points you get for slaying a 2013 Beetle Fender Edition.

Anyway! At long last, the lift is now fully operational. A good day's work, capped off by a fine sunset from the VAB.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Also seen here is one of the extensions they offer, which are needed for applications like this since the lift usually has to reach around body panels and whatnot to get to the frame members. As an aside, those things are heavy. From the photos, we expected them to be thick-walled tubing sections, but apart from the hole in the top for the adapter to plug into, they're solid steel all the way down.

You can kind of see how that works here. The bed section is off the pickup right now, but if it were on there, the lift needs this vertical clearance to hit these rear lifting points without crushing the side panels...

... and the same in front.

Now we can pick up the older vehicles safely. Well, the truck, anyway. The Impala might be a trickier lift, because for reasons known only to GM's engineers, that generation of full-sized Chevrolets had an X-shaped frame instead of the conventional H-shaped arrangement. This was not really an issue in the days when shop lifts were a huge hydraulic cylinder in the floor that you drove the car onto and then pushed it up from below, but the type that has to reach in from the sides can have trouble reaching. There are some workarounds, but we'll have to see later on how it goes.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.