Trail X wrote:Finally got the hoist up in the garage and the rtt off. Seems to work great so far. Allows me to even store the half rack on top if the rtt.
Annoying part is that I have to remove the cover and ladder to fit the truck w/ rtt into the garage. I do need to get more rope though... I'd like to be able to lower the tent all the way to the ground if needed.
As a follow up, since I moved, my new garage door is a bit lower than my last place. I can no longer fit into the garage with the roof top tent on top of the vehicle. I am still storing the behemoth in the ceiling of the garage with the same hoist as before though, because its too big to store anywhere else.
So instead of driving under the hoist, lowering it down on the truck, and driving away, I had been requiring a second (or sometimes a third) hand to manually carry the tent out of the garage, and then lift the tent into place on top of the truck. It sucked.
So in my search to ever improve efficiency, I made a crane that mounts into the rear hitch. It has two modes, first is a 'flat stick' mode, where it can pick up the tent off of a set of saw horses after being dropped from the ceiling and then 'caddy' it out of the garage. This mode is seen below:
Then, the tent is set down on top of saw horses again, and the crane is configured into the high angle "install" mode. The angled gusset under the boom is pinned into the higher position, and the tent is then hoisted off of the saw horses. A pin is pulled at the base of the crane that prevents it from rotating on its hinges, and the tent can then be pushed 180 degrees around over the truck roof.
The tent is then lowered down onto the studs in the roof rack and fastened down. Its not the fastest process or most efficient, but it can be done entirely by one man, so that in-itself is worth it for the self-sufficiency.