Cables
The most frequent job here, and a wear item rather than a failure. Replacing them on schedule costs a fraction of replacing them after one parts.
What goes wrong
The usual suspects
In roughly the order we see them on this lake.
A motor that stalls
Usually the supply rather than the motor — see below. If it only quits after several lifts in a row, that is heat instead: these motors are rated for fifteen minutes and carry no thermal cut-out. When it genuinely is the motor, it is normally the bearings or the capacitor.
Gear plates
Worm gears wear, and a dry one wears fast. Grease fittings exist for a reason and are the cheapest maintenance on the whole lift.
Pulleys
A grooved or seized sheave is the most common reason a cable wore out early. New cable over an old pulley is money spent twice.
Brackets and bunks
Bunks out of level mean the boat and the lift have both been taking it. Bracket problems are usually the wrong bracket rather than a broken one.
Switches
Drum switches live outdoors in weather. When a lift runs one way and not the other, this is the first thing to look at, not the last.
Why a lift that worked for twenty years suddenly stalls
This is the call we take most often, and the answer surprises people, so it is worth setting out properly.
A lot of the docks on this lake were built twenty to twenty-five years ago. The lift that went on them was usually a 3/4 HP motor on a 2,800 to 4,800 lb plate, and the boats of the day suited that. The wiring run from the house to the boathouse was sized for that motor, and it worked.
Boats have got heavier since. A lift matched to what people run now needs a bigger motor — our standard is the 1 HP heavy duty on a 6,500 lb plate, and heavier boats go to the 1.5 HP. Those motors draw more current than the ones they replace.
So the supply that was adequate for decades can be marginal the day a new motor goes on, without anything about the wiring having changed. The sign is a motor that runs fine with nothing on the lift and stalls part way up with the boat.
The honest version is rarely “your wiring is bad.” It is that the run never had much margin, the old motor lived inside what margin there was, and the new one spends it.
The fix is either putting a proper conductor in that run, or converting to 240 V, which halves the current the motor draws. Both are an electrician’s job. We can point you at one, we can order a motor set up for 240 V if the job is planned that way, and we sell the GFCI a conversion needs.
How we work
Diagnose, then replace
A motor that trips is the clearest example. It might be the motor. It is at least as likely to be a binding cable, a failing gear plate, or a supply that cannot hold voltage under load — and three of those four are cheaper than a motor.
Replacing the obvious part without finding the cause is how a lift ends up eating cables, or eating motors, on a schedule nobody can explain.
What we take on, and what we pass along
Boat lifts are the work. Cables, motors, gear plates, pulleys, brackets, switches and the wiring that feeds them.
Sometimes a lift needs structural work before it will do its job — the dock reinforced where the load lands, a beam picked up, brackets moved to somewhere that will hold them. That comes with the territory and we do it.
Dock building and shoreline work are not what we do. If what you need is more of that than it is a lift, say so on the phone — we can usually point you at somebody, generally somebody we already work with. That tends to be a better outcome than us learning on your dock.
Common questions
My lift runs one way but not the other. What is that?
Most often the switch. Drum switches sit outdoors in weather for years and the contacts for one direction can fail while the other keeps working. It can also be wiring at the switch. Either way it is usually one of the cheaper faults, which is worth knowing before anybody talks about a motor.
The motor hums but the lift does not move.
Stop running it. A humming motor that will not turn is drawing heavily and going nowhere, and that is how a motor gets cooked. It can be a start capacitor, a seized gear plate, or something jammed in the drive. Leave it and call.
What fails most often?
Cables, by a distance. They are a wear item and replacing them on schedule costs a fraction of replacing them after one parts. After that it is motors and gear plates — though as above, a motor that trips is often not the motor.
How long can I run the lift before it needs a rest?
Fifteen minutes — that is the run-time rating on the nameplate of the motors we fit. The five minutes’ cool-down between cycles is BH-USA’s own guidance rather than a nameplate figure. These are non-venting motors with no thermal cut-out fitted, so nothing stops them if you go past that — the winding is what gives, and in our experience that gets treated as misuse rather than a defect.
Lifting a boat takes under a minute, so this rarely bites in normal use. It bites when somebody jogs the lift up and down lining up bunks, or leaves a remote running. If yours quits after several lifts but is fine on the first, that is heat rather than wiring.
Do you do boat lift restoration?
Same work, different word. Whether a job gets called a restoration, a rebuild or a repair usually comes down to how much of it needs doing at once — a lift that has sat through a few seasons might want cables, a motor, bearings and brackets together, which starts to feel like a different job even though every part of it is on the list above.
Describe what you have got and we will tell you what it actually needs, which is sometimes less than people expect.
Do you work on lifts you did not install?
Yes, and most of the repair work we do is on somebody else’s installation. Flat-plate hoists are broadly similar across the brands, and parts for the common ones are not hard to come by.
How quickly can you get out?
It depends on the season. Spring and summer are our busiest and scheduling is tighter; the quieter months we have more room. If the boat is in the water and something has failed, say so when you call — that changes the order.
Where we work
Repairs anywhere on the lake
Lake Sinclair runs through three counties and we work all of them.