Winch-Driven Lifting Boom

This boom was designed, built, and patented by my father, and my name isn’t on the patent. He wanted to lift with the winch on his utility vehicle, so he built an A-frame that stands at the front of the vehicle and turns the winch’s horizontal pull into a vertical hoist. A second line changes the angle of the arm under load, so it can pick something up and then move it. His version worked well, but it was built to be made by him, and he asked me to redesign it so fabrication shops could quote it.

A one-off gets built by the person who already knows what they meant. A shop quoting from drawings needs every stock size, length, angle, hole, and weld spelled out, or they’ll pad the quote or decline it. So the redesign was mostly about turning a working machine into a complete, unambiguous specification.

I split the design into a welded frame of 2 x 1 inch rectangular tube and a set of bolted-on plate parts that can come straight off a laser or waterjet. That way two different kinds of shop can quote their own half. I also made the claws that grip the load bolt through a slotted pattern instead of being welded in place, so an owner can adjust them for different log sizes. The whole assembly uses just two fastener sizes.

The package is three sheets: an assembly with a fourteen-line bill of materials, the frame weldment with ordinate dimensions from a single datum, and the plate parts with hole tables that a shop can enter directly into a machine.

The package went out and got quotes, which is what it was built to do. My father later moved toward licensing the patent instead of selling units himself, and a licensing conversation needs a design someone else can build, so the work still serves that.

A few small parts could be easier to fabricate than I left them. The bigger gap is that the design has no rated capacity. Selling it in quantity would need a proper load case, analysis, and test behind a published rating.