Commitment to Innovation
"We may learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport." -Ben Franklin, 1780
Well, we’re not about to levitate a thousand people. We’ll leave that to the Einstein’s of the world. We are, however, all about levitating boats – yours - a thousand times…
No, we didn’t invent the very first boat lift, we had nothing to do with inventing hydraulics, we didn’t discover 12 volt electricity or the brushless motor. …And no, we’re not the ones claiming to have invented the question mark either…
We will however, take credit for being the first successful pioneers to combine an aluminum boat lift with hydraulic power and a safe 12 volt motor source along with great style and performance.
History in the Making
It started with a desire - a passion – we know, it’s only a boat lift - we’ll try to keep it real… …but when you see up close what we did, you’ll understand if we sound a little ‘out there’. We love it, absolutely, positively love it. Crazy? Maybe. But ask yourself, if you’re going to build your dream house, buy an exotic car, enjoy a gourmet meal, or shoot scratch golf, wouldn’t you want those ‘passionate’ people on your staff - inventing, designing, building, testing, and encouraging… until… it’s perfect?
It’s the mid 80’s, Ronald Reagan (the actor?) was president, the Dow was at 1,200 (it would triple by 1995, five years later it would break 10,000). A home on a lake was built, and a boat was purchased… A background in engineering and experience with hydraulic equipment would lead a local inventor to ask himself if there wasn’t a better mousetrap available. 4 months later, a crude version of today’s HL series was born… It was a 2,000# capacity, single cylinder, 12 volt, aluminum cantilever lift. We used a single acting snowplow cylinder, a hydraulic pump from the Grainger catalog and tested it with my father’s pontoon boat with 600# of brothers… Crude? No doubt. Successful – very much so. The following year we added a second cylinder and made it double acting, so now it lifted and retracted under power. We still bought our pumps from Grainger and raised the capacity to 2,500#, we rented space from a local welding shop and redesigned the hinges, it was called “The Genesis Sea Lift”.
