Container Lifter

After we bought our first set of container cars from USA, we realized that there was nothing made to get them off the car. So we decided to build one.

Here are some close pictures of what it looks like. It is made mostly from bass wood.  Everything else was made like all our projects, from odds and ends.  We knew it needed to roll on the ground, so we added rubber wheels.  Where did we get those? We took them off of an old broken remote controlled car.  We then needed some way to make the grabbing portion move from side to side.  We did that by making all the upper beams I-beams, and putting wheels in the middle of the "I."  We got the wheels off of hot wheels cars from a long time ago.

We then had to find a way to pick up the containers.  We realized that the mechanism we were looking for was on the paper tray of our printer. It is the thing that changes from plain paper to envelopes and if you push one side the other one goes too.  This was the hardest part to find.  We finally found a Hewlett-Packard printer tray at a used computer store.  The guy thought the idea sounded good, so he sold it to us for $5. We then had to tear apart the tray for what we wanted and then added the wood to it in order to grab the containers.  We added some foam to each end to hold onto the container better.

We then made a box around the outside of the mechanism to make it look better. We found that we still had remote controlled car parts around, and decided to make the grabbing portion lift up and down.  We took the gears from one car and added a DC motor to it and we had that done.  We even used some of the plastic from the printer tray to build a box for the motor. We used sewing bobbins to hold the string to the motor.  We then painted it and added details and we were done.