I am taking delivery of my Denali, first kayak, soon and I started to wonder where the heck I am going to store the thing while not in use. I have no floor or wall space left in my 4 car garage. I know I could go to the hardware store and buy all the stuff included in this box but my time is worth something. What do you think of this for hanging a kayak? Is there a better one out there? TIA http://www.organizeit.com/kayak-storage-hoist.asp
I have one of mine hung in the shed on something similar that I made myself from a set of straps you use to secure the boat to the car and some hooks from the hardware store threaded into the rafters. Works just fine.
If you have an 8 ft ceiling in the garage you may have to shorten up the straps, put different hooks on or do other things to get the boat high enough to clear the vehicle. By the way, Denali is a finish package. It could be a GMC 3500 pick up truck with dual wheels like my daughter’s or a cross over suv like my dad’s. Either one will conflict with a low hanging boat. You can install this rig so you can pull the boat up by the t-handles to smaller hooks and clear some vehicles.
Be sure to use lag screws into the wood trusses. Don’t cheapen up the fasteners and go too light. The hoists will want to be placed above each end of optimum angle. Note that you’ll need to be directly below the cleat for it to work easily, proper angle thing.
I’ve hung two kayaks this way.
@Overstreet said:
By the way, Denali is a finish package. It could be a GMC 3500 pick up truck with dual wheels like my daughter’s or a cross over suv like my dad’s. Either one will conflict with a low hanging boat.
He’s referring to his new Eddyline Denali kayak.
People frequently remind us that a plastic kayak needs to be well supported, preferably at bulkheads if there are any, especially when the hull is hot. Hanging a plastic boat by the very tips, up near the ceiling where in a typical garage the temperature can exceed 110 degrees if open to the attic, sounds like not the best idea to me.
There’s a simple solution to that low-hanging-strap problem which I’ve mentioned before. Attach each lifting rope to a horizontal cross bar, and then hang your ‘U’-shaped strap from that. By that method, you can hang the boat almost as high as you want, with the hull just 3 or 4 inches below the lifting pulleys. Properly modify the cross beam that carries the strap and you can get a couple inches higher still. Also, if the points of strap attachment to the upper cross beam match the width of the kayak, you eliminate that pinching action that you’d get if all you did was shorten the strap shown in the OP’s link.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Look at the hanging brackets in this video and photo. To make it work for a kayak, keep the upper beam of the bracket, but replace the vertical rods and lower horizontal beam with a single strap that wraps around from one side to the other.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/11908573@N00/15087468855/in/album-72157646635661100/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/11908573@N00/14900929167/in/album-72157646635661100/
The blue rope shown in the one photo is only a backup sling in case there’s a failure in one of the lifting ropes during storage. It’s not part of the hanging system.
How you do the lifting is up to you. It needn’t be a hoist as shown here. The main point here is that a properly designed hanging bracket will get the boat right up tight against the ceiling while still supporting the hull in the best way.
@Rookie said:
@Overstreet said:
By the way, Denali is a finish package. It could be a GMC 3500 pick up truck with dual wheels like my daughter’s or a cross over suv like my dad’s. Either one will conflict with a low hanging boat.He’s referring to his new Eddyline Denali kayak.
Yup…missed that. Too many Denalis. They even changed the name of Mt McKinley back to Denali. 
@Overstreet said:
Yup…missed that. Too many Denalis. They even changed the name of Mt McKinley back to Denali.
So, the OP is trying to hang Mount McKinley from his 8’ garage ceiling??? :o
If you don’t have excessive heat issues in the garage, that hoist you sent the link to should be just fine.
If the garage does heat up to 90s or above, then you might have an issue of plastics softening and indentations forming in boat. If this is the case, the you would want a method where the weight of the boat is spread out more (not just a 1" or whatever size strap), and that it is supported at the bulkheads if possible. Your Eddyline being ABS plastic and not polyethylene like a rotomolded kayak should help this some.
I use straps to hang one of my kayaks BUT what always bothers me with these kits is that the straps are super skinny. I use 4 inch wide straps. Spread that load out is a good idea in my opinion.
@kfbrady said:
@Guideboatguy that system you have put together is seriously cool!
It’s the result of evolution! The boat in the video was my first that needed some kind of hanging system. The only boat I hung from the ceiling before that is aluminum, so manually lifting one end at a time to clip metal hooks to the carry handles was easiest and best. The place where the aluminum boat hangs has changed three times as more paddle craft took up residence in the garage!
For the boat in the video, I started out with two hand-pulled lifting ropes tied off to cleats on the wall, and the boat was not quite that close to the wall. Pulling the lifting ropes took more “pull” than just the carried weight of the boat due to some inefficiency in the pulleys, but also just holding half the weight of the boat via a hand-held rope was harder than I had expected, and moving each rope a little at a time to shuffle the boat up and down, tying off to a cleat while switching from one rope to the other was pretty awkward, and the whole thing was an accident waiting to happen.
The second setup used a hand-crank winch up in the attic, with a direct line which split on its way to the lifting pulleys. That was okay, but I needed a ladder to operate the winch, and when I started getting more boats I could see that putting all the winches in the corner of the wall would be a lot better. All I needed was more pulleys to make the switch.
So, the final setup uses a hand winch on the wall (as do the other hoists), and the location of the boat was moved closer to the wall as additional boats arrived.
@kfbrady said:
@Overstreet said:
Yup…missed that. Too many Denalis. They even changed the name of Mt McKinley back to Denali.
So, the OP is trying to hang Mount McKinley from his 8’ garage ceiling??? :o
It could get to 110 in the garage I suppose. Those temps are rare in Oregon West of the Cascades. BTW, I don’t have room for cars much less Alaskan mountains. Too many hobbies in there. 12 foot ceiling with 2 window cross breeze, Not open to attic.
Which is better pool noodles or pipe insulation to pad the straps?
@Dave Kingman said:
Which is better pool noodles or pipe insulation to pad the straps?
Hmmm…I’m not sure. I think either would do, but wouldn’t just straps themselves have a greater contact area?
FYI, when I built myself a wheeled cart to store 2 boats I ordered stuff from these guys…
They carry webbing up to 4" wide.
Nice boat by the way!
Nice boat by the way!
Thanks. It is my understanding that it is a good choice for big guys, me 6’1" 275lbs and just starting out with Kayaking. REI has good deals with discounts on paddles, PFDs peripherals and member rebates. I’ll check out those straps.
Guideboat guy. I have a few questions on your hoisting setup - as I plan to install something very similar.
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At every point where a lifting rope makes a directional change - have you used a piece of rolling-element hardware there (or are some direction-change points at static fasteners -like eye bolts)?
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Is there a chance that you have a schematic sketch of your setup - just showing the line routing and type of hardware at each point without any dimensions? If not - if I sketch something out and post it - would you mind looking it over and pointing out any major errors?
Thanks!
Steve
I have used pullies before to lift a boat to a third story apartment, I currently use ropes and straps for most of my boats. But my favorite garage system consisted of T hangers above the garage doors. It worked very well, with their boats, at their, home, with their cars. They could pull in, close the garage doors, and lift the boats strait up to the rack. But the best part, when they opened the garage door up, their boats were completely out of view.
That said, they probably had 9ft garage ceilings with standard heigh garage doors, and normal height vehicles. It gave them almost 2’ above the door. I think they had the builder raise the ceiling when the house was built specifically to do this with open canoes
I started with the Harbor Freight bicycle hoist which is similar to the one you mentioned. It looks like it was made by the same company.
I ended up throwing away most of the components and rolling my own. One of the problems with the all-in-one system was that there was too much room on the side of the pulleys, and sometimes the rope got stuck on the side of the pulley. What were they thinking?
All you need are good quality pulleys, (thick) rope, and some eye lag screws.
It can be tricking to get everything lined up and working just right. I’ve got some new pulleys coming today, and I’ll post a picture when I’m done.
Here’s how the kayak is supported:
My garage is one-car, but has a loft, so the rafters are 16’ up. I started years ago with a simple 2x4, some eyebolts, steel cable, and hardware store pulleys. This Summer I took some scrap angle-iron, welded a frame, and re-rigged the lift so that now the frame holds two boats with 3" wide tow straps (I cut an old one and added grommets) and uses a Harbor Freight electric hoist to go up and down. I also used a Harbor Freight engine hoist balancer so that I can tip the ends of the boats downward to clear the garage doors when open.
The frame:
The rigging:
The hoist:
When fully up, they are high enough for me (5’11") to walk under without hitting my head.
