Looking for a project for my welding students this semester and wondering if any of you have made scissor lifts for our cars.. It would be a cool project.. It would be very inexpensive as well.

Yup, made one right before I welded up a space shuttle.

I used to build them up to 160K tons for a living.
I have all the parts and blueprints, except for the steel and cylinders, for a 7 ton (yes ton) scissor lift table.

I mostly worked on the 7 ton table and I built all of the Tennant sweeper truck lift/dumps in the late 90's, prototypes and assembly/QC.

BTW because I know how to build them is the reason I'll never use a Chinese scissor car lift.


Go to :55 in, I assembled/QC and built the original prototypes for this lift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UU4oYTWdJg


1:38 of this vid has a better view,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNc2gkqfVfg

What about a rotisserie? You could have the parts cut up via water jet for ease of assembly. You could even offer those kits for sale here for those of us who don't have time or the means to cut up the parts.

David

Since all these projects are being constructed at a school, does the school get a percentage of the sales or just one of those advantage of being in the right place benifits...while the students get an education?

What projects? I was just thinking about making a lift in class thought it would be cool..

If you are referring to tanks, heat exchangers, sheet metal etc that's all built by myself and a longtime friend in my shop.. So there there is no conflict of interest I assure you of that..

The benefits of having students is you get to make stuff that is so unrealistic cost wise and they benefit greatly from the experience.

Example would be the scissor lift.. Who in there right mind would build one when you can but them cheap.. I would guess a project like this could take 18 students a combination of 400 hours to make so again just a learning tool nothing for sale guys I keep church and state separate.. ☺

My biggest problem with the scissor lifts is they have no base frame, even the smallest table (IIRC 1.5 ton) I made had a base frame. It was nothing more than an angle iron frame with the pivot points at one end and the rollers ran on the inside of the frame. The frame had basicly a U-channel where the rollers ran and was bolted to the floor when installed.
Also welded to the base frame was a series of stops so you could manually lock the lift.

If you look at the pic below it gives you an idea of what I'm talking about.

Also the tables I made all had bearing rollers and bearing bushes at the pivot that could be greased, not just pins riding on steel.

What I have is all the rollers, and bearing bushes and all the laser cut steel parts for mounting the cylinders to the torque tube, pivot points, pins, etc.
I'm only missing the common steel stock and the cylinders.

I was going to make a car lift with all this stuff, downscale the spec to say 10000lb.
Then I picked up an AAMCO 7K 2 post lift for $1000, I couldn't buy the steel for much less then that and I still needed the cylinders, hose and powerpack.

Good points.. I could have those parts machined.. I think the hydraulics are a huge part of the design and cost.. Looks like run of the mill powerpack is about 300 and the cylinders look to be about 125.. Or so

I think it's doable just a big project.