Heres something I just cobbled together to solve a problem I have had for years. My house is 30 x 36 (two stories plus full basement). The basement contains a two car garage, plus A/C and hot water heater, and on the back about 14 or so is cut off with a load-bearing wall which forms my shop and a storage area (mostly Christmas decorations of which we have way too many).That leaves about 22 for boat storage. Not enough. Fortunately my shop is on the same side as the garage bay I use for my boat, and when we built this house, I had included a 4 wide door so that I could get a mower/lawn tractor/engine stand (auto) and such into my shop. It turns out the door is exactly centered with the garage door. So what I have been doing is, since I cant back the boat into the basement due to lack of room with a wide boat transom, I have been pulling it by hand into the basement hitch-first. This allows the trailer tongue and the first foot or two of the bow to stick inside that door to my shop, leaving me enough room to close the garage door with room enough for that ginormous merc pro sx on the back. But it is a challenge since driveways have to be sloped away from a house to keep water from coming in under the garage doors, and the people that do the basement floor / driveway put a fairly noticeable drop out the door to further prevent water infiltration. It also prevents boat infiltration when me and my son are trying to push it in by hand. This is a 9 wide door, and this classic + trailer has about 2″ clearance on each side after the door framing and everything. The older I have gotten, the harder this has been to do.p Boat is heavy, cant stop when it gets close to door otherwise cant get it moving again, opening is narrow, lots of things make getting this into the house almost impossible for one person.This week I had enough. I went over to harbor freight and bought one of their 1500 lb 120vac winches. To mount it, I bought a 16 2×10 and cut the first piece about 5 wide, giving about 6″ overlap on each end of the door. The idea is to put that 2×10 inside my shop, butted up against the wall on each side of the door (actually butted against the pressure-treated 2×4 that forms the bottom plate of the wall, where this 2×4 was nailed to the concrete in the usual way so it is not going anywhere. On top of this 2×10 I mounted the winch with the spool directly in the center, which is directly on the centerline of the garage door as well. I was concerned that since the winch mounts on top of this 2×10, it might tend to rock toward the boat under load, so on each end I cut a piece of the remaining 2×10 (about 12″ long) and glued and screwed it to the edge of each end, so that each end of the 2×10 lies flat and contacts the wall with the edge, then these two pieces run up the wall about 10″ to prevent the twisting from happening. I then cut a 10″ piece of 2×10 and cut it diagonally giving me two triangles which I then glued and screwed to the 2×10 that contains the winch. Now the 2×10 cant rock forward and those two end supports are braced so they wont let go.This worked perfectly. I can now spool the winch line out (35 or so which is way more than enough to reach the tongue of the trailer). The only thing I had to do was replace the control box wire (which was 12 long or so) with something that let me get to the front of my boat so that I can guide it in while operating the winch. I have a carefully marked centerline on the garage floor that extends outside to help me get it lined up correctly, and now I simply grab the front, line it up, and hit the retract button. This thing pulls reasonably slowly (10 per minute at no load, about 1/2 that at max load). Gives me plenty of time to watch the two sides of the trailer to make sure everything is centered. Winch has no problem pulling this weight (the tech support people I called said if two of us can push/pull it, it is nowhere near 1500 pounds of effort and it looks like this thing is just coasting). It does have a brake so that when you let the button go it stops and does not unwind.I put it in the garage this afternoon without working up a sweat or pulling any muscles. All I have left to do is to remove the jack/wheel on the trailer, take it apart and clean and lube it. Wheel is pretty hard to steer. If anyone has this problem, I can probably do a drawing showing how it looks, or even post a pic.If you have a much bigger budget, there are clever trailer carts that have batteries and a geared drive motor. I like this approach because after I get the boat in, I can stand this thing up on its end and it is way out of the way. I put a hook on the end and hang it up between the 2x4s wall studs (it has sheet rock on the other side that faces the garage).Last edited by oldtimer57 on November 7th, 2016, 6:05 am, edited 2 times in total.2008 Pantera Classic2014 Mercury Pro XS 200
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