BendPak Lift with Integrated Dyno

Chris from vintagesaab.com sent me an email asking for help posting his story. Here it is....verbatim.

First...the before photo.



Then the story...

My new dyno (Dynocom 15000 series with 750 eddy brake) arrived last Wednesday. Crated it weighed around 5,000 lbs. so I arranged to have transport from the shipping terminal done on a tilt back auto transporter (that turned out to be a very good decision). See the crate below



It was loaded a bit offset on the bed, and that made for some interesting cornering. Once the truck got square to the garage mouth. Larry (my body and paint man, and flatbed operator), jiggled the crate off the truck bed and on to dollies.

Here she is uncrated but still sitting on the bottom skid. Prior to the arrival of the dyno, I relocated my Bendpak HD-9 4 Post lift to the rear of the garage (the caster kit is very handy). Who needs a forklift when you have a lift  So my friend Mark and I were able to roll the dyno in to position between the ramps. My garage has to serve many purposes, so placement of each major item is a study in compromise.



Here the dyno has been unbolted from the bottom skid. Lift straps are run around the drums and chains make the interface to the lift ramps. Lift is rated at 9000 lbs. but we were near center where the capacity is about half of that. Just about what the naked dyno weighs. The lift when up smoothly and there was no noticeable deflection in the ramps. (the front surface of the dyno has a protective film covering a stainless steel skin)



The lift that did the lifting is a Bendpak HD-9ST (which their short and narrow version). The trained eye might also notice that we trapped the lift behind the dyno. NTW, this lift disassembled and found a new home.

A new Bendpak HD-9XW (extra wide, long, and tall) lift will grace the front of the dyno. In fact the lift arrived on the next day and Mark and I picked it up last Friday. We are pretty good at setting these up and breaking them down so in about 3 hours we had the lift up as you see below.



The column on the left sits between the blast cabinet and my large roller chest. You make the lift wider by moving the left ramp. Notice the rollers are very wide and even with the ramp moved there is no need to relocate the dyno or the lift. Surprisingly, this dyno does not have all the much bigger a footprint than my old 2 roller cradle dyno, but it is taller.

Here is a better shot of the dyno and the above ground kit (the frame/plates behind). Not shown are the d-rings that attach to the plate and are used to secure the vehicle for testing. There a 5 foot wide path behind the dyno. The dynos maiden voyage is Wednesday when Dan comes over with his Miata.



Hope you enjoyed.

Jeff

That's awesome Jeff!

Well if he ever dynos a car with some power, those organizers on the wall will be TOAST!

This is my personal garage and the dyno is principally to tune my own cars. As a Saab guy, many of my cars are FWD. And I am not planning on running any fire breathing RWD cars. As I said earlier, the setup in my garage is all about compromise. However, I do plan on adding some sort of protection in front of the organizers.

Over the last few days I have been running tests and getting used to the new dyno. So far so good. The real fun begins with step tests to tune the Weber carbs on my Sonett.

WoW, really nice toy... I mean dyno ! =D You've got a pretty nice garage and you're probably going to have a lot of fun doing tuning on your cars !

Yeah, tuning is going to be fun. Old school on the Sonett, twin Weber 40DCNFs and a turbo Miata with Megasquirt ECU. And some more mundane things like Saab 9-3 Viggen Saab 9-5 Aero, and Mini Cooper S.

It is somewhat ironic that my most powerful car, Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 is all wheel drive and not tunable on my unit.

But back to the power of the Bendpak lift. Clearly I was using it in a way that it was not designed for, but it performed like a champ. Lifted the 5000 lb crate like the lift was empty. My buddy Mark was impressed, but then again he already has his own HD9-ST.

The HD-9XW frame is wider than the 4 post lift sold by Dynocom (and less expensive). An above ground lift makes some aspects of dynoing easier. With the car on the lift, you can elevate it to comfortable working height, examine it, and hook straps up (preliminarily). On a lowered car this is very advantageous. You can also access O2 bungs more easily. However, overall hook up is not as fast as an in ground dyno, but I decided not to dig up my garage floor. So the lift makes the dyno usable, and I still have a second work bay. I have a lift table that makes moving the RJ45 jack on an off a snap.

Mark used a 4 post lift to position a huge Pratt and Whitney lathe in his garage.

Not really visible in the picture are the heavy duty roll dollies. These are heavy duty units from http://www.redhawkent.com/ I used 3 (more based on the support structure of the crate, rather than the capacity of the dollies -- 2 would have done fine)

WOW that is one of the best setups in a home garage I have seen. Nicely done. I had a 94 Bishi VR4 wish I still had it. Car was awesome. Heavy as all heck but was such a nice driver. I leased it and gave her back. The dealer wanted to get me to take the "Spider" looking back would have been a nice one to put away... I was at a shop with my Mustang that had some clown put his GMC Danali on a dyno.. before he could tell me he did'ent really do what I think he did I was looking for a new place to bring the Mustang. Yup truck was all wheel drive and moved on the dyno. Hit the wall and left some marks but could have been a lot worse if the strap let go..

Thanks wnstwolf, I looked hard and long when upgrading from my old cradle dyno. This one is a beast and I dont anticipate needing to upgrade again. What I learned on my old dyno is that you can not do steady state/step testing with an undersized eddy brake. The torque at the wheels is many times the torque at the crank. The eddy brake in this one is mounted directly to the drum shaft and has massive flywheels with cooling vanes like a disc brake.

Rest assured I will not ever attempt to test a 4 wheel drive vehicle on a 2WD dyno. At best you burn out the center diff, at worst you have a horrific accident of some sort.

I am upgrading the Dyno to AWD. You can read about the garage bay build to house the AWD system here

http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=311033

Sure now that I left Bangor. Good luck with one of the coolest tools in a private garage.

Damn, that was quick. Much envy and best of luck