Salty Dog II wrote: ↑Sun Jun 07, 2020 1:19 pmAnother question: I only need my trailer to pick up the boat, and drop it in the drink 3 hours later. In looking at the construction of the trailer, I plan on disassembling it and store it in my attic! Anyone know if anyone has done this? Were going to have a canal home and probably won't be trailing it at all. I just can't see paying to store it and don't want to sell it if the occasion ever rises to need the trailer. Your thoughts?
Pull the wheels, fenders, goal posts (if any), and bow winch tower, and hang it otherwise complete from the garage ceiling. Use a pair of electric winches, and some safety chains for backup, and use load rated hardware throughout (not cheesy aluminium carabiners). Assuming you have access to the attic floor structure, reinforcement should be easy.
The cichiest residential construction has load requirements of 30 LB per sq ft, so a 1000 pound trailer only needs distribution of force over 30 square feet , a little over 5x5 foot area. Pretty easy to do with lumber
My old truck camper shell was more weight than the boat trailer and I winched it up into the rafters of my garage all the time to store it. I live in a tract home in California where there are no storm or hurricane codes so you can't get a house more chintzy than that.
Do what Tom said - a decent block and tackle would do it (I would not even bother removing anything from the trailer).
BOAT wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:16 am - a decent block and tackle would do it (I would not even bother removing anything from the trailer).
I only mentioned that because the trailer may be too tall to walk under cleanly with the tall stuff on it.
As to weight, put the heavy end near the end of the rafters, or put the whole thing off to one side, again near the ends of the rafters. Keeps the bending moment down. If they're trusses, you want the lifting points at or near the panel points (where the diagonals meet the chords), and if that's not possible, reinforce the lower chord to take the bending of a load at mid-span. Those garage trusses usually are not designed for any load on the bottom chords other than sheetrock and wind pressure load, and are often just 2x4's.
The haters only hate cuz they don't have one. At my marina, which is almost exclusively sailboats, I am the ONLY boat who can head out to a beach 20 miles away, stay for 10 hours on the beach, and be back before dark. Everyone else sails out, sails around for a few hours, and then heads back in....booooring. Not to mention that I can walk the boat up onto the beach. Or wakeboard the kids on the way over. Or sail part of the way. Or, forget the beach, we can trailer-up and four hours later be 200 miles away sailing at a location that would take a "real" sailboat three days to get to, if they were lucky.
