Motorcycle Lift

By Uncle Hans
This is how it all started. I have been formulating a plan for years to put my motorcycle on the back of something for the purposes of hauling it and leaving the trailer home. These are my latest doodles........



......................my neighbor and Wallyball friend is a mechanical engineer and a welder. these are his doodles, which are more professional than mine. Together we massaged the design (the Miller Lite never hurts this process!) until we ordered the steel..........


...............This is $400 worth of steel tubing and two crank jacks, like you see on the front of trailers.......



.......the tough part is attaching it to the frame of the motorhome. The receiver hitch carries most of the load, but it is maxxed out at 600 lbs and the bike and rack weigh in at 750. So we had to bolt two "outrigger" tubes to the frame of the rig.........



......the work was done at Danny's place.......


......we had fun. Grinding here, but welding stuff too.............


............ this is the result, ready for testing. It breaks down into two pieces. One attaches to the motorhome and the other is the lifting section, which bolts to the other piece...........





....this is the part that attaches at three points to the rig. It may stay in place if it looks OK painted. It makes a swell bumper!.........


........now the drama begins as we start loading concrete blocks onto those planks........



...........it looks OK, but the true test is driving it down the road. That is almost 700 lbs of load and the bike weighs 550......


.....we drove it to our house, about 300 yards. It looks pretty good, the back end does not sag..........





......the rig has some levels on it for seeing if it is level (probably news to no one on an RV blog). It also has some air bag load leveling rear shocks, which we adjusted to 75 psi and that is why she is so level..............


.....time for final "adjustments" and some International Harvestor red paint. The three tubes that attach the thing were not exactly parallel, which is hard to weld. So we got Danny" "adjusters", a green one and a yellow one. Amazing what heavy duty hydraulics can adjust.........


......and the final product, ready for a real road test. We took it up to some friends place in Brule Wisconsin, near the south shore of Lake Superior. We camped overnight and drove some really crappy secondary roads, about 200 miles. When we got home we climbed underneath and checked for cracks or failures. Nothing yet.
 


The real test comes during a future ride to Savannah Georgia to do some exploring with the bike and lay on the beaches of Hilton Head.
Sound like a blog?..........
By Uncle Hans