Hydraulic Car Parking Lift

grabcad

Design of a hydraulic car parking lift in Solidworks. It is a two column lift, powered by a hydraulic power unit. You can find this kind of lift available for residential use where there isn't enough space in the parking floor for all the vehicles. I designed it according to a common model from a Chinese vendor that has a load capacity of 2 ton. There is 2.1 meter height clearance when fully raised, with 5x2.9 square meters of floor area. For demonstration purpose Tesla Roadster model was used which is of 2m width and has a wheelbase of 2.8m with 4.2m length. The hydraulic power unit is from a generic design and kept outside. Except the car model, the whole assembly is designed in Solidworks and rendered in Keyshot. It took more than 7 hours to complete the render work, the rendering time was prolonged because of the textures I added to the parts for metal-like appearances. While working on this project I came to realize that Solidworks needs some optimization with its animation workflow when there is a large assembly to work with. Even my 5th gen Ryzen 16 core processor was struggling with animation playback. However, rendering was quite seamless.