So, you think building a jacking horse is easy, huh?
Everyone and their dog seems to have a plan for one. Download a PDF, buy some 2x4s, slap it together. Done in an afternoon. That’s what they tell ya. What a load of crap.
My own journey with this “jacking horse” thing, well, it wasn’t just one straightforward project. It turned into a whole saga, really. I initially just wanted something simple, you know, to hold up heavy stuff like engine blocks in my workshop. Those cheap plastic stands you can buy? They just buckle under any real weight. So, I got it in my head, “Right, I’m going to build a proper one. Solid steel. Welded good and proper. Something that’ll last.”
First off, there was the business of getting the steel. Took me ages to find the right gauge – something not too heavy to move around, but definitely not flimsy. Then came the cutting. My old angle grinder, it screamed bloody murder for what felt like days. And the welding? Let’s just say my first attempts at laying a bead looked more like pigeon droppings than anything structural. I must have ground down and re-welded sections so many times, the folks next door probably thought I was trying to start some avant-garde metal band.
I went through a few ideas for the lifting part:
- First, I messed around with a screw jack mechanism. Turned out to be way too slow and just incredibly fiddly to operate.
- Then I upgraded to a hydraulic bottle jack. That thing had power, no doubt, but it was bulky as all get-out and, wouldn’t you know it, started leaking oil all over my workshop floor after about a month. Made a right mess, that did.
- I even got tempted by some fancy scissor lift design I spotted in an old workshop magazine. I sketched it out, spent a good while looking at it, and then realized I’d probably need an engineering degree just to figure out the pivot points correctly.
The whole thing just sort of ballooned into this monster of a project. I had bits of wood from one prototype, chunks of metal from another, a whole collection of different bolts and fasteners I’d bought thinking, “Ah, this’ll be the one!” My workshop started to look less like a place of work and more like a scrapyard’s less organized, slightly more confused cousin. And after all that, the damn thing still wasn’t as stable as I wanted. It wobbled like a nervous rookie on his first payday if you so much as looked at it wrong.
But you know, there’s a good reason I even bothered to put myself through all that hell. It wasn’t just for the fun of it, believe me.
Years back, I was underneath my old pickup truck, wrenching away on something stubborn. Had the truck up on these ridiculously flimsy axle stands, the kind you pick up for next to nothing. I was right under the heavy part, totally focused, when one of those stands just… gave way. The whole truck lurched sideways. It missed crushing me by maybe an inch, no exaggeration. Scared the living daylights out of me, that did. I swore, right then and there, that I’d never trust a cheap stand again. And if I couldn’t find one good enough to buy, I’d build the blasted thing myself, no matter how long it took or what it cost.
That old fear, that memory, that’s what kept me grinding away at this jacking horse. I absolutely had to have something I could trust, something I could practically bet my life on when I was working underneath a heavy load.
So, what’s the situation now? Well, what I’ve ended up with isn’t going to win any beauty contests. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, to be honest. It’s got a heavy steel frame, that’s for sure, but the lifting part is actually a modified heavy-duty ratchet hoist mechanism that I managed to salvage, combined with some seriously beefy locking pins. It’s not particularly fast to adjust, and it’s certainly not elegant. But it is absolutely solid. I can jump up and down on the thing, and it doesn’t budge an inch. It took me months of fiddling, cost way more than I’d ever planned, and probably added a few new gray hairs to my collection. But it works. And more importantly, I don’t get that cold sweat running down my back anymore when I’m getting under something heavy.
So yeah, the next time someone casually tells you that building a “jacking horse” is just a simple weekend build, you can just nod and smile. They clearly haven’t been through the wringer with one yet.