Up until now I haven't tried to photograph the details of my standard canoe hoist because the lifting ropes are mostly out of sight up in the attic of the garage, and also because my garage could use some cleaning/organizing. However, I just built another standard hoist (this is my 6th one), with slight modifiction, for a friend, and her garage is more photogenic than mine, and with finished ceilings, the hanging-hardware details are easier to see.
First, I took a few shots of the hoists for three of my own boats just to provide a general idea how a multiple-boat hoisting system can be setup and organized. Those photos are followed by detailed shots of the new hoist in the prettier garage. Each photo has a caption below it, and if you read every caption, just about every design detail is addressed.
This is the method I use for building every overhead canoe hoist, and I like it because handling the boat is a one-person operation, it's very fast (much faster and easier than alternately taking up the slack in a pair independent hanging brackets or slings), the boat is on rigid supports (not pinched at the gunwales like with slings), and no physical exertion is required. Some people might get a few ideas of their own from this.
Here are the photos:
http://outdoors.webshots.com/album/563649911waQmyp
Nice job !!
excellent work
Excellent work, as usual. I especially like the idea of attaching legs to the brackets to temporarily convert the hoist to a sawhorse-type setup. Where did you get the legs?
On the installation for your friend, I thought tying off one line was a simple and elegant solution to the problem of unequal length. However, if you did want to be a purist and avoid the extra step, could you have added another pulley on the floor and thereby gained enough extra length to make it a one-rope winch job?
Hey! Long time no see.
Glad to see you are still around.
The “sawhorse” legs are home-made. They originally mounted to the lower hanger bar with a pin inserting into the wood from below and a piece of angle-iron fitting against the outer end of the 2x4 to keep it from spinning, but that was to flimsy. The wrap-around mount with a clamping wingnut was an improvement that turned out well. A simple alternative is to simply lay those 2x4 bars on wide-top sawhorses, if you always have a couple of them ready to use.
As to single-line winching, the easiest way to accomplish that would have been to mount the winch against the back wall rather than the side wall, which would have put the corner-rounding pulley up by the ceiling quite a bit farther from the lifting points (the back wall was finished and the side wall was not, making the side wall the “easier” option). I think an extra pulley on the floor would not eliminate the need for the upper corner-rounding pulley, but perhaps I don’t understand what you are suggesting. To clarify, what matters is the distance between that final “rope control” pulley (which routes the rope off in some new direction for the last time before reaching the actual vertical-lift point (in this case there’s just one corner to route the rope around)), and the nearest vertical-lift pulley. If there’s too little room between those two points, the fork in the rope will hit one pulley or the other (depending on whether the boat is being raised or lowered), limiting the amount of vertical lift that can be accomplished.
Perfect!
A boat hoist that one person can manage. I thought it would require a Z-drag 
Even the headings on each image are perfect. Nice job!