I'm a man of conveniences! Well, maybe I should say I enjoy efficiensies. If it's not as efficient, I tend to get annoyed pretty easily.

Believe it or not, I'm annoyed with the 3 winches on my drop down fish house. Yup, having to winch each one annoys me. Crazy, huh? Well, it's not a bad thing. I took that frustration and turned it into a pretty sweet idea turned design. I built this trailer for the hovercraft, but may incorporate the design into the fish house.

The video isn't the highest quality, but you'll get the idea. Thanks you ShawnnyB for taking it!

Drop down Trailer

Drop Down Trailer 2

wow so how much and when can you build one for me?

My first house I made had the same thing with pulley on tongue with drophitch it took a little more muscle to crank up and my house was only 6 by 10 but when cable broke on me once under house out on the lake was not much fun to fix.I now have Hydraulic lift on my house and I do not think I would go back to cables and cranks. MY 2cents

how did u get that to work so good?

This is copied from a post I made in the Ice Fishing forum:

There's only 1 pulley in this design. The cable runs off of the winch, down through the tongue to the main beam where it meets up with a pulley that sends the cable to the back. There, the main cable is wrapped around an 8' long, 1" round bar that runs through 3 bearings. The pivot arms are brought down by 2 seperate cables, one at each arm. Those cables are wrapped around the ends of the 1" round bar.

There's really very little effort involved. I thought about running 2 cables, with the main cable attaching to another cable that's connected to each pivot arm via pulleys, but I believe that this system is more fail safe, and is less stressful on the whole system. Also, because my pivot arms are so long, I take advantage of the lever action, requiring less force to lift the trailer.

I stole these wheel systems from my fish house for this trailer, and need to build new ones for the fish house. If I go with this method, I'll make the arms even longer than the current ones to ease the stress. Gotta love physics

Also, all three cables have more wire than needed, so that if there is a break, I'll still be able to winch the house up. The whole thing isn't perfect, but I'm surprised at how well it worked right off the bat for being a new design. The next trailer will have a few minor improvements, but will probably be pretty much the same setup. MMmm, push button winch

My knowledge of hydraulic is pretty much nil, so getting into that would be like jumping off the building without my trusty batman outfit. Probably end up with the same resulting puddle though

nice work dave! you never stop amazing me! i still say you need to be your own boss and go into business! how does the new hover run anyhow? did you take it out on an inch of ice yet? and how fast does it go compared to the one i was in?

I'm still working out the bugs on this one. The drivetrain is completely different, and needs some refining. When it's all said and tuned, I'm expecting around 60 mph out of the single 38 hp lawn tractor engine. Also, I'm looking at putting wings on it and flying in ground effect 5' off the water. This one is a whole other animal

These videos were taken at the little green boat access about 3 weeks ago. I was out on 2-3" of ice for the most part, but crossed over some real thin stuff next to open water on the way back. Being the only thing that could save me, I took it easy :-)

nice