On 2 May 2005 06:46:36 -0700, jim rozen
wrote:

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

Come on over some weekend and we can put one together. And the pipe is
free.

Gunner

"At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child -
miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied,
demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless.
Liberalism is a philosphy of sniveling brats." -- P.J. O'Rourke