Just putting this out there for people who may be contemplating a vehicle lift and may have to modify their standard door lift.
The standard garage door looks something this. As you can see the door trolley and lift motor need to be raised.
In my case (on the other bay where the lift was installed) I recessed the trolley track into the ceiling to maximize the lift height. I left the door track where it was and extended the lifting arm using perforated angle. Two things to note are that the lift trolley must be moved back to maintain the proper angle of the lift arm and recessing into the ceiling can only be done if the ceiling joists run in the same direction. The trolly was boxed in with plywood and plastic edging added to clean things up a bit.
Two problems with this is that you cannot have the door open when their is a car on the lift and extending the lift arm meant I lost about 6-8" of door opening height which limits what you can get in the bay. Also note that by sheer dumb luck I was able to remount the lift motor above and just behind the equalizer cable tray. I did have to remove the light on the motot to make it work.
This all worked but with nice weather I wanted the door open while working on a truck and I wanted to reclaim the full opening height of the door. In my case I have 10.5 in ceilings, an 8ft high door and have installed an old-style 7000lb Rotary brand hydraulic lift I picked up at a divorce clearance price.
So this is how I modified the existing track... (a construction laser helps with alightment)
Basically I removed all the track above the 90 degree bend. cut the 90 bend into 2-45s, removed 34" of horizontal track and put it into the 45 deg section, joined together all the new track sections with suitable hardware and reinstalled. If you do the math 34" at 45deg adds 24" of vertical height. The existing lift spring can also remain in place.
A couple things to note:
- A little trigonometry comes in handy to design the new track before cutting.
- I forgot about the recessed trolley and it's going to tight for the door to open
- check if there is handle on the outside of the door to be accounted for
- this may require adjusting the spring tension to account for the added lift but I haven't figured out how to do that safely - will call a technician for that
Regards and be interested to see pics or threads of similiar/alternative solutions.
The standard garage door looks something this. As you can see the door trolley and lift motor need to be raised.
In my case (on the other bay where the lift was installed) I recessed the trolley track into the ceiling to maximize the lift height. I left the door track where it was and extended the lifting arm using perforated angle. Two things to note are that the lift trolley must be moved back to maintain the proper angle of the lift arm and recessing into the ceiling can only be done if the ceiling joists run in the same direction. The trolly was boxed in with plywood and plastic edging added to clean things up a bit.
Two problems with this is that you cannot have the door open when their is a car on the lift and extending the lift arm meant I lost about 6-8" of door opening height which limits what you can get in the bay. Also note that by sheer dumb luck I was able to remount the lift motor above and just behind the equalizer cable tray. I did have to remove the light on the motot to make it work.
This all worked but with nice weather I wanted the door open while working on a truck and I wanted to reclaim the full opening height of the door. In my case I have 10.5 in ceilings, an 8ft high door and have installed an old-style 7000lb Rotary brand hydraulic lift I picked up at a divorce clearance price.
So this is how I modified the existing track... (a construction laser helps with alightment)
Basically I removed all the track above the 90 degree bend. cut the 90 bend into 2-45s, removed 34" of horizontal track and put it into the 45 deg section, joined together all the new track sections with suitable hardware and reinstalled. If you do the math 34" at 45deg adds 24" of vertical height. The existing lift spring can also remain in place.
A couple things to note:
- A little trigonometry comes in handy to design the new track before cutting.
- I forgot about the recessed trolley and it's going to tight for the door to open
- check if there is handle on the outside of the door to be accounted for
- this may require adjusting the spring tension to account for the added lift but I haven't figured out how to do that safely - will call a technician for that
Regards and be interested to see pics or threads of similiar/alternative solutions.
