Garage Bike Lift System
Any bike owner will likely agree that bike storage can be a tricky problem. They are big bulky items that don’t really fit anywhere compactly. With five bikes, wall hooks weren’t going going to cut it in my case, even if I had the space. So I opted to build a hoist system instead. Mostly because I wanted the bikes to be up and out of the way, but also probably a little because pulleys are fun. I looked at the commercial products first, but all of them left me with the impression that quality was a distant second priority to achieving a competitive low price point. Yuck. So, I built my own. Nothing too complicated, but thought I’d post it here in case it helps anyone thinking of doing something similar.
The four hoists I built needed about 200 feet of rope in total. It would have been less if I had routed each hoist differently, but I had shelves I wanted to keep free from rope entanglements, so I had to route the rope path above and behind those. I also wanted to centrally locate all the rope tie-down points to make lifting and lowering each bike a little easier.
Hardware Info:
- 20 pulleys for hoisting (5x each hoist bay)
- 14 pulleys for cable routing (3-4 each)
- 8 Carabiners to attach bikes to hoist (2x each)
- 4 Rope fasteners
- 2 Baskets to hold rope length
- Variety of eye screws and quick links to achor pulleys & rope tie-downs
Pic 1: Three bikes up, one down.
Pic 2: Hoist in action
Pic 3: Ropes extended from anchor points. Had to make custom mounts to fit two bikes between rafter joists.
Pic 4: Carabiners & spare rope used to attach bike to hoist
Pic 5: Vertical panorama of cable routing from ceiling to wall, two blue (outside) and two red (inside) ropes. Baskets are used to keep the extra rope length tidy.
Pic 6: Close-up of the rope fasteners. The two on the right are old climbing ascenders I already had and wasn’t using. The two on the left are Figure 9 rope carabiners.
