Garage Bike Lift System
As any bike owner knows, bike storage can be a vexing problem. In my case, with four plus bikes, wall hooks simply weren’t going to cut it. I opted to go with a hoist system mostly because I wanted the bikes to be as high up and out of the way as possible …and maybe a little just because pulleys are fun. There are of course commercial solutions available, but most, if not all, look like quality was sacrificed to meet low price points, yuck. So I built my own. Pretty basic stuff, but I am posting pics here in case it helps anyone thinking of doing something similar.
The four hoists I built needed about 200 feet of rope. It would have been a little less if I hadn’t routed everything in the roof plane and inside the wall cavity behind the overhead shelves. I wanted those free of any rope intereference. It also provided everyone with easy access to the tie-downs to raise/lower each bike.
Hardware Info:
- 20 pulleys for hoisting (5x each)
- 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.
