Introduction: A Crane for My Car Roof Tent

About: Hi, my name is John. My hobby is to solve problems from other people and creating nice and functional stuff out of trash. I'm living in Germany so excuse my not so fluent English (some technical terms are hard…

I've a roof tent for my car. It is quite nice but the installation on the car is a pain in the ass due to a mass of 100Kg. My wife can't help me to lift the tent to the roof. My father and a neighbor helped me several times.

I wanted to install the tent in only 30min with the help of my wife. The solution is a crane to lift the tent on a car. (I do all the work my wife only has to move the car)

Step 1: The Raw Material

I've found a 3 1/2m V2A Steal pipe in my cellar. Also I've found some quadratic steal pipes.

For easy assembly of the quadratic steal pipes I've created a negative for later steps.

Step 2: Time to Weld

The rest for the V2A pipe are welded onto the supporting structure of my garage roof. Here the negative of the pipe was quite handy.

Step 3: Apply Some Changes to the Standard Hoist

The ordered hoist from ebay only had some crappy clamps in the package. So I've made even more crappy one but these fit at least.

Also the remote had an quite short cable attached, now it is long enough to use it from the ground.

Step 4: Assembly

Everything fits together quite well. The V2A pipe is clamped to the rest, to prevent it from moving. The hoist is bolted to the pipe as well. This way the length of the crane is adjustable.

Step 5: The "Tragegeschirr"

As you see, we have a word for carrying harness. It is needed to avoid any defect on the roof tent. It's made of four steal beams, and old steal shelf and old snow chains.

Step 6: And Action

Nothing to write here. Just watch...