A lot of people try to make their garages more user friendly by putting up peg board for the tools, hanging the bikes from hooks in the ceiling to get them out of the way, and building shelves along the walls to stack things on. “Those solutions are all well and good, but they don’t utilize the available storage space to its full potential,” says Kevin Shaha, president of Racor, Incorporated, a Sandpoint, Idaho company that specializes in garage storage solutions.

Shaha’s company is about to introduce a new garage storage device that he says will revolutionize the industry. The HeavyLift system will allow you to store virtually anything out of the way and off the floor by making use of the space on the ceiling.

The easy-to-install do-it-yourself kit, which will be available through retailers nationwide, the Sears catalog, and online at www.racorinc.com in March 2005, includes heavy duty steel support beams which you will secure to the rafters, a four-foot-by-four-foot platform, a winding axle, enough vinyl coated steel cable for a ceiling up to 12 feet high, a hand crank and all the mounting hardware.

All you have to do is screw the support beams into the ceiling, attach the winding axle with the enclosed hardware, thread the steel cable through the support beam wheels and attach to the platform, then use the provided hand crank to raise and lower the platform. “You can safely store up to 250 pounds on it,” says Shaha. “It’s a great way to keep the lawnmower out of the way in the wintertime, or you can use it to store file boxes, third row car seats, outdoor furniture, tires, pretty much anything you can think of that normally takes up a lot of space.”

An added plus is the safety factor. The American Ladder Institute reports that each year, more than a half million people are injured and 165,000 visit emergency rooms after falling off ladders. With a HeavyLift system in your garage, you’ll never have to climb a ladder again. All you’ll have to do to get down something heavy is hook up the hand crank and lower the load, then take whatever you need off the platform and crank it back up to the ceiling.

And once you get those bulkier items out of the way, you can make better use of the limited shelf space you have in the garage. So instead of using shelves to store boxes and other bulky items, you can put cleaners, auto accessories and other things you need immediate access to on them.

Courtesy of ARA Content