Fred thanks for weilding the big hammer on my behalf, much appreciated. as for your idea, man you way overestimate my abilities. I would certainly love to do as you suggest, but i havent got the 1st idea how to make it happen.

Now i have been tossing some ideas around, of course this is subject to verification with our steel catalog, and some questions tossed at some of my customers designers. I am thinking 4 to 6 inch tube 3/16 to 1/4 wall for the uprights, or 6 to 8 inch i beams, then 6 to 8 inch beams as the runners, with a 4 to 6 inch beam as the trolley beam this is most likely overkill, i wont be lifting anything to heavy, guessing a max of 1 to 1.5 tons. thanks Dan

 

As a guy who has a crane, here are my two suggestions:

1. Put two bridges up. (I have two trollies on one bridge and now, six years later, I really regret not having the second bridge - it is very handy)
2. Cover the whole shop. (I covered half the shop, 20' x 40'. Killer mistake)

 

Hey Robin, i deliver steel to the quad cities everyday, particularly Bettendorf, the northside of Davenport and then the northern "suburbs", occasionally i help the other truck in southern davenport and the il side of the river. are you around during the day? where do you work does it have anything to do with fab, machinery, basically anyplace that recieves steel shipments? Dan

 

FTE Fred is right - I didn't realize this was new construction... if it is, have the architect designing the garage incorporate the beams as part of the structure itself, it's by far the best way of acheiving this AND it adds to the strength of the structure. It's not that difficult to do - and why you have an architect design it - you simply follow the plans when building.

 

That's kinda where I was heading with the thought on putting a perch on the uprights. Just run the beams down these the length of the shop, and no need for extra posts as long as the uprights are engineered to handle the weight.

 

My buddy's garage was built out of cinder blocks for the first floor, with the side walls being two blocks wide. 12' high. The back wall and front wall are the standard single block width.

The i-beams lay on the inner blocks of the side walls, and the front, back and outside blocks of the sidewalls have a standard stick-built 2nd floor and loft on top of that, which the joist-based roof is attached to. His doesn't have any vertical I-beams, as the place was built specifically to support the i-beams with the cinder blocks. The i-beams are 6" wide and 10" tall, as is the cross i-beam on trolleys that spans the width of the 2.5 car garage. He had custom garage doors made so they're taller and wider than what is typical of home centers, and this allows him to drive his crewcab into either garage bay with no issues - it's midly lifted - nothing radical.

He motorized it in the back corner using a complex set of gears, pulleys, and thick steel cable that runs around the perimeter of the garage, pulling the left and right trucks in unison. It's a homemade job, but it works VERY well and solves the problem of having two motors on each side not operating in pure unison. The cross beam's trolley has a big motor hanging off one side, so it moves with the trolley. Since the span of the two sides of the trolley is the width of the i-beam, it can't get out of alignment as a long span would, and why the complex pulleys and cables exist.

It's geared down a bit so it's slow moving in all directions, I'll guess and say that from all the way front to all the way back takes about 5 minutes. Side to side is about the same. Slow, but by far better than humping heavy stuff around with engine cranes, and by far more stable. He's got a triumph with a rover V8 he's been working for years and he stores engines and other heavy parts in front of that, so it's a matter of hitching the item to the winch, and lifting it high enough to clear the triump and over it goes to the back of the garage, on whichever side he wants.

His garage was designed around the I-beams he got for free, left over from a steel job in NYC, so some of the dimensions would be considered rather strange. He's got the property for this structure so his town didn't care at all, as long as he got the proper permits to grease their coffers.

As a side note, you're also not obligated to span the entire width of the garage with one beam on trolleys, you might get away with lesser sized steel (thus less costly) if you run the side beams on the front and back wall, this way the span between the beams is much smaller in length - since you can go left and right and forward and back, it doesn't really matter which way things run since you can still hover the winch anywhere in the garage. But you could support the long beams with the front/back wall and the span would be smaller, assuming a typical garage shape.

 

In many cases the building contractors may have experience with adding an overhead crane to a building. It is important that you ensure your building is strong enough and can withhold the load of the crane at full capacity.

The overhead crane will indeed free up a ton of floor space for you; however using a small gantry crane be beneficial as well since they are quite mobile and do not affect the structure of the building.

 

Thread back from the dead-
Cranes can be very handy as long as they are properly set up. It is very easy to put more lifting capacity than available carrying capacity, so know the limits of your structure before attempting to lift anything of any real substance.