has anyone built their own boat lift?

if so, please share as much info as possible.

hopefully i will be in need of a boat lift next summer. my girlfriends dad is a super good welder, so i was tossing around the idea of maybe making one. i know some of you are going to say, why go cheap on a boatlift that will be cradeling your $33k boat, and trust me that is in my head too. just want to see if anybody out there has successfully built their own.

My dad built 3 back in about 1999,one for us and 2 for the neighbors, we all kinda helped...it doesn't take very long and IMO ours was better than a $4K equivalent. You can def. add some options that you like for cheaper as well...we had detachable wheels for pulling it out/putting in, and a walk around dock bracketed right off the lift for easy tarping. I think almost all of the steel we used was 2" square.....al this being said, when we got our new Tige we took the shortcut and bought a lift. It can be done though, and fairly cheap too.

what kind of lift? you wont' need to weld anything on an overhead cable style.

good to know derek. basically i think all a guy would need to do is have there buddy's boat lift (holding the same exact boat as mine) sitting right next to you and just start building away.

i'm looking at doing a Cantilever lift

I built mine..
I was not that hard....
I purchased most of he stuff from Mike at botlifts.com
the only problem I had was off setting the pull hoist bar so the tower would miss it....
We have a two story boat house and I wanted to lift the boat as high as possible so that gear could be loaded and off loaded into storage room on second floor.. Works like a charm.


When I off set the hoist it added extra tension to the pullys on the other side of the boat. so I added a 4" flat bar all the way across the beams in the boat house.