lifting heavy stone post/electric winch?

[John Williamson]

It will anyway, but you'll feel better having tried to stop it.

[Andy Dingley]

Something like that. Older model Clarke I think, as my narrow wheels are closer set.

They're good things. Talk your richest anvil-owning mate into buying one, then borrow it. It's one of my most-borrowed tools.

I mostly mount it on the floor. It's often used for winching, sometimes for lifting from down in holes, occasionally by going up and then down again over a pulley. Some extra pulley blocks makes it a lot more use. Next planned use is to pull a steel girder portal frame upright around a garage roller shutter.

For overhead mounts, usually fasten it to solid things by a couple of big U bolts. Timber roof trusses or horizontal scaffold poles. I noticed that Amazon also had people selling a =A340 slewing jib to go with it, that mounted on a vertical upright, post or solid wall. Looked like a useful thing to have over the big lathe.

Like most of these things, it's useless on its own until you've been to a cheap farm auction and picked up a bagful of assorted strops and shackles.

load.

It's _very_ prone to toppling. Really, really prone to toppling. Assume that _anything_ you lift with it is just planning to fall off and either land on you, or break itself - from workshop anvils up to Range Rovers.

It's a swine and a half to switch it from lift to lower. Mine is packed with a wrap-around cover over the oily bit for storage and this cover includes pockets for both the instruction manual (and disclaimer forms) and also a 1lb copper hammer to clout the reversing pawls with.

These things are just evil. I won't lend these to people who I don't trust with firearms and chainsaws.

[Andy Dingley]

Possibly how it was installed.

It's easier though with fewer, bigger, blokes (I used cage fighters last time I needed this). Rugby players have a fair lifting capacity each, but they're too wide to get many of them near it at once. It's much easier if the post has a hole through it, because you can then put a needle through it (scaff pole etc.) and then have your BBs spaced out along the pole.

[Nightjar]

The local tug of war team might be more useful for what I had in mind - an A frame to convert horizontal pull to vertical lift. Nobody needs to be near the post when it comes out of the ground and you can put as many people as you can get hold of onto a long rope.

Colin Bignell