IMM Quality Boat Lifts has a long tradition of engineering excellence. Our company makes use of this expertise to custom design boat lift solutions that perfectly fit your property. If you have been working with another boat lift company and you have gotten the feeling that they want to sell you a “one size fits all” solution, please give us a ring and talk to our engineering design team. We will make sure that you get a custom lift design that best suits your needs. With an IMM Quality boat lift, you can rest assured that you are getting the best-engineered boat lift on the market.
Sometimes, putting a lift into a boathouse can be rather difficult. Many of our competitor’s designs require the lift to be made a permanent part of the boathouse structure. Their boat lift top beams are made with risers that support the boathouse roof structural framing. Therefore, to replace the lift, you must literally take the roof off the boathouse. Or what if the boathouse was made before you were able to install a boat lift? Again, you would have to remove the roof before installing these kinds of lifts. We have always felt that this was a poor engineering solution. The engineers at IMM Quality Boat Lifts have developed solutions for boathouses that will give you many options to choose from. Why let another company force you to tear your boathouse roof off when IMM Quality can provide you a boat lift for your existing boathouse that is safe, durable and easy to use.
Our customer on Flathead Lake in Bigfork, Montana wanted to install a boat lift into a beautiful boathouse that he was building. This boathouse had some unusual design features. None of the piles went above the level of the dock’s decking. The boathouse was framed with large timber beams that were secured to the dock framing. The structural beams that run parallel with the slip have decking directly below them. This prevents hanging the boatlift from beneath these structural beams because the decking would be in the way of the cables and cradles.
Our first suggestion was to hang the boatlift from the structural beams that run across the slip. Due to the location of the cross-members and the center of gravity of the boat, this choice would have required the boat to be located “off-center” within the boathouse. The customer did not like the look of this solution. Therefore, we suggested using side-mount brackets with standard top beams. These brackets allow the installation of the top beams parallel with the slip, but move the cable drop away from the decking, out over the water.
Here is a side mount bracket.
Here is the engineered drawing of a side mount bracket.
And here is a picture showing how the side mount brackets allow the installation of standard top beams to the side of structural beams.
Once the customer was happy with how the boat lift would be mounted to the boathouse structure, our design team made sure that everything else made sense. The customer provided the dimensions of the dock and boathouse. He provided the type of boat and mentioned that he might like to upgrade to a bigger boat in the future. From this information, our engineers created a slip layout and custom-designed the top beam’s length, capacity and winder position to accommodate the largest size boat that could conceivably fit within the customer’s boathouse. These custom modifications resulted in the boat lift top beams being cantilevered with a cable drop forward of the side mount brackets. This will give the customer some room to grow.
Slip layout with boat lift design to maximize boat size within boathouse.
All that was left was to install the lift, get a boat on it, and enjoy the time on Flathead Lake! Great job by all involved.
