mx5cartalk.com

This is something that seems to come up a bit but I'm yet to see any timber attempts with measurements so I figured I'd show mine. Whipped this up this weekend in ~3h and for under $40.



Everything is made from non-structural timber from Bunnings purchased in 70x35x2400 slats for $2.88 a pop. It's 1000mm high, 880mm wide, and 520mm deep. The cross braces on the side were just placed by eye and are ~650mm. The stalks at the front are 300mm but are massively overkill, you could probably get away with less than a third of that. Everything is just attached with 60mm timber screws and there's castor wheels at each end to make moving it around easier. Additionally I bought a carpet tile, cut it down and attached it to anywhere that the hardtop would actually be touching. Cost breakdown:

3x timber slats @ 2.88 = $8.64
4x castor wheels @ 2.80 = $11.20
1x carpet tile @ 4.95 = $4.95
50x 60mm screws = $6.54 (plenty of spares here)
30x 30mm screws = $3.97 (for the wheels, also plenty of spares)
Total = $35.30

If anyone wants any more details feel free to ask.

Cheers!

DIY FTW - screw paying Megabuck$ for a commercial version!

Prior to my hardtop hoist I used a modded version of this Mitre10 Flat-Top trolley:

I moved the vertical bars about 1/3 of the way in (drilled 4 new holes for the mounts) to prevent it tipping with the hard top on it, mounted 2 rubber door stops at the opposite end to stop the hard-top from sliding off, padded the base with leftover 10mm rubber matting from Clarke Rubber and padded the vertical bars with foam. Cost me about $60.
The beauty of this was that I could easily move the hardtop about my garage.

Unfortunately, no matter how careful you are, the hardtop is quite large and you'll eventually end up knocking it if it's anywhere near ground level. Leaving it on your car or mounting on a wall or hoist on the roof is the best way to keep it safe (mounting via a hoist on your roof can be dangerous but after you've nearly seriously concussed yourself 3 times you'll remember it's there - at least it did with me).

The trolley has now been reverted to its original configuration and serves to store my sadly under-used track rims/tyres. With a 600x600 board on top it makes a great workshop mobile table.