In article , Gunner says...

Around here, most of the serious motorheads have a shop crane..nothing
more than a pair of A legs with a 10' piece of 4" pipe across them.
The fancy ones use a pair of stubs welded as sockets below the 4" pipe
so you can push it over and break it down. Few do though.

Mine is an H frame made of 3" oilfield pipe, , but with A legs,
carrying a piece of 8" I beam 10 foot long. Its 12 ft tall. Socketed
so I can break it down if I wanted to. I actually put the I beam up
with my Carolina 2 ton engine hoist and a short extention added to the
already extended boom.

I want to build a setup like this - the riggers here use just such
an A-frame.

A steel I beam that spans pipe legs. They made up a plate for each
end out of U-channel, with 2.5 inch pipe sockets welded on at a slightly
compund angle (so the legs splay slightly to the sides) and they use
2 inch pipe as the legs.

Each plate is held to the I beam end with threaded rod, going up to
another plain flat steel plate. The whole setup breaks down quite
nicely, they run a hoist on a trolley on the beam.

I figured when I make it, I'll try to tie the legs together across
the sides to stiffen it, with a bolt-on connection.

Basically I'm waiting for the local voc-tech school welding class
to kick in. Wed nites, 6 to 9 every week. I might be close to
knowing how to arc weld after a few months!

But the knock-down feature is nice, that way I can store it in the
back of the garage as a bunch of linear sticks until needed.

Jim


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