crane

15 Articles

3D Printed RC Crane Has Epic 3-Foot Reach

September 3, 2024 by 8 Comments

Have you ever looked out the window at traffic and seen a giant crane driving alone the road? Have you ever wanted a little 3D printed version you could drive for yourself without the risk of demolishing your neighbors house? Well, [ProfessorBoots] has just the build for you.

The build, inspired by the Liebherr LTM 1300, isn’t just a little RC car that looks like a crane. It’s a real working crane, too! So you can drive this thing around, and you can park it up. Then you can deploy the fully working stabilizer booms like you’re some big construction site hot shot. From there, you can relish in the subtle joy of extending the massive three-foot boom while the necessary counterweight automatically locks itself in place. You can then use the crane to lift and move small objects to your heart’s content.

The video describes how the build works in intimate detail, from the gears and linkages all the way up to the grander assembly. It’s no simple beast either, with ten gearmotors, four servos, and two ESP32s used for control. If you really need to build one for yourself, [ProfessorBoots] sells his plans on his website.

We’ve seen great stuff from [ProfessorBoots] before—he’s come a long way from his skid steer design last year. Video after the break.

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Custom-Fit Small Shop Crane Lightens The Load

April 19, 2022 by 13 Comments

On the shortlist of workshop luxuries, we’d bet a lot of hackers would include an overhead crane. Having the ability to lift heavy loads safely and easily opens up a world of new projects, and puts the shop into an entirely different class of capabilities.

As with many of us, [Jornt] works in a shop with significant space constraints, so the jib crane he built had to be a custom job. Fabricated completely from steel tube, the build started with fabricating a mast to support the crane and squeezing it into a small slot in some existing shelves in the shop, which somehow didn’t catch on fire despite being welded in situ. A lot of custom parts went into the slewing gear that mounts the jib, itself a stick-built space frame that had to accommodate a pitched ceiling. A double row of tubing along the bottom of the jib allows a trolley carrying a 500 kg electric winch to run along it, providing a work envelope that looks like it covers the majority of the shop. And hats off for the safety yellow and black paint job — very industrial.

From the look of the tests in the video below, the crane is more than up to the task of lifting engines and other heavy loads in the shop. That should prove handy if [Jornt] tackles another build like his no-compromises DIY lathe again.

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Building A Workshop Crane From Scratch

November 26, 2020 by 8 Comments

Buying tools is all well and good, but it doesn’t suit the ethos of Youtube channel [Workshop From Scratch]. Building what you need is much more the go, and that’s demonstrated ably with this home-built electric workshop crane.

The crane is put together in a straightforward manner using basic steelworking techniques. Plates and bars are machined with a drill press, bandsaw and grinder, though we could imagine you could use hand tools if you were so inclined. An ATV winch is pressed into service to do the heavy lifting, powered by a set of 12V lead acid batteries placed in the base. This design choice does double duty as both a mobile power supply for the crane, and acts as a counterweight in the base.

The final result looks sharp in its orange paint finish, and does a good job of moving heavy equipment around the workshop. The legs are reconfigurable, so that even very heavy loads can be lifted with appropriate counterweight placed on the back. It’s a significant upgrade on the earlier version we featured last year, which was hydraulic in operation. Video after the break.

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A Crane Fit For Any Workshop

September 26, 2019 by 18 Comments

Sometimes we will encounter items in our workshops that are a little bigger than we bargained for. An engine block, an anvil, or a particularly substantial machine tool. Lifting these things may be possible, but doing so risks injury, perhaps a hernia or worse. For these moments a particularly well-appointed workshop will include a small crane, and [Workshop from scratch] has posted a video that we’ve placed below the break showing the construction of a particularly nice model.

The fabrication of a crane is not in itself a difficult task, in that most metalwork-minded readers could probably make one. What’s appealing about this video is the sense of gratification at watching metalwork being done well, and that while he does use a bandsaw and a drill press there’s not a lot in the video that couldn’t be done with more basic tools. The result is a handsome item that is probably better than many commercial offerings, though the gut feeling here is that the pivot points would have been better made with a sleeve and pin rather than a threaded bolt. The lifting effort comes from an off-the-shelf hydraulic ram.

Cranes feature here surprisingly rarely, but at least we’ve brought you a balcony crane.

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A DIY Balcony Crane Lifts Groceries For The Lazy But Patient

September 9, 2018 by 39 Comments

If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness is probably its father. Or at least a close uncle. Who hasn’t thought, “There has to be a better way to do this, one that doesn’t involve me burning precious calories”?

Motivational laziness seems to increase with potential energy, as anyone who needs to haul groceries up four flights of stairs will tell you. This appears to be where this balcony-mounted drill-powered crane came from. Starting with a surplus right-angle gearbox and drum, [geniusz K] fabricated the rest of the crane from steel plate and tubing. We like the quality of fabrication and the tip on making slip couplings from bits of square tubing. The finished product got a nice coat of brown paint to match the balcony railing; keeping the neighbors happy is always important. He tested the crane with a 20-kg weight before installing it on the balcony and put it to work hauling groceries up three stories. Check out the build and the test in the video below.

While it won’t set any speed records, at least the drill is doing the work. But what if you’re impatient as well as lazy? Aside from being two-thirds of the way to programming greatness, you may have to up the game. A heavy-lift quadcopter, perhaps?

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Fishing For AirPods With Magnets

July 30, 2017 by 35 Comments

Note to self: if you’re going to hack at 4 in the morning, have a plan to deal with the inevitable foul ups. Like being able to whip up an impromptu electromagnetic crane to retrieve an AirPod dropped out a window.

Apartment dweller [Tyler Efird]’s tale of woe began with a wee-hours 3D print in need of sanding. Leaning out his third-story window to blow off some dust, he knocked one AirPod free and gravity did the rest. With little light to search by and a flight to catch, the wayward AirPod sat at the bottom of a 10-foot shaft below his window, keeping company with a squad of spiders for two weeks. Unwilling to fork over $69 and wait a month and a half for a replacement, [Tyler] set about building a recovery device. A little magnet wire wound onto a bolt, a trashed 100-foot long Ethernet cable, and a DC bench supply were all he needed to eventually fish up the AirPod. And no spiders were harmed in the making of this hack.

Need to lift something a little heavier than an AirPod? A beefy microwave oven transformer electromagnet might be the thing for you. And confused about how magnets even work in the first place? Check out our primer on magnetism.

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Heavy Lift Electromagnet From Microwave Oven Transformers

January 15, 2017 by 41 Comments

It’s OK, you can admit it — from the time you first saw those huge electromagnetic cranes in scrap yards you’ve wanted to have one. While it may not fling around a car, parts donated from scrapped microwaves can let you build your own electromagnetic lifting device and make that dream finally come true.

We recently watched [MakeItExtreme] turn a couple of microwave oven transformers into a somewhat ill-advised wall-climbing rig. It looks like that may have been the inspiration for this build, and the finished product appears to be a tad more useful this time. The frames of three MOTs are cut open to remove the secondary coils and leave the cores exposed as poles for the future magnets. A shallow dish is fabricated out of steel and the magnets are welded in place.

With the primaries wired together, the magnets are epoxy potted, the business end is faced off cleanly, and the whole thing put to the test. [MakeItExtreme] doesn’t go into control details in the video below, but the website mentions the magnet being powered off a 24V 15A power supply with battery backup in case of mains failure.

They’ve lifted 200kg so far, and it looks like a pretty cool addition to a shop already packed with other builds, like their MOT spot welder and a propane tank sandblaster.

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