How to Make a Lifter?

Do you know what is a lifter? A lifter is something that carries heavy loads. It works on the principle of Pascal’s law. A simple lifter is a hydraulic lifter and is one of the commonly known lifters. 

You must have observed a balloon and an airplane flying even if there’s a weight difference. So, what lifts them up? Also, you might’ve seen a lifter in service centres and garages. You feel enthusiastic to build the same device.

If you are the one looking for an effortless and interesting technique to build the same, keep scrolling this page.

How to Make a Lifter?

In making a lifter, we will use the following household items:

• Cardboard for listing

• Fevicol

• 0.8 inch round table (2.032 cm)

• Scissors

Steps to Make a Lifter

• Cut an indexed board wider by 1/3rd, while keeping the longer side the same size as that of the object to be lifted. A lifer with a width of 0.25 inches and a length of 1 inch would be enough for a 0.75 round table.

• Now, fold the strip of paper to make it of the shape of an alphabet ‘N’ 

• Apply fevicol on one side of the paper lifter and attach the end with the fevicol cover against the backend of the diagram where the picture would be placed for raising.

• Now, attach the label to another part of the lifter of paper. If the object attached does not possess a label with a sticky part, try using fevicol to secure it at the lifter end.

Concept of a Lift

Let’s hold a spoon in one hand and a balloon in the other. Release your hands and you observe that the balloon rises up and the spoon falls.  Similarly, if you take a pan of millions of spoons and consider an airplane. The airplane flies while spoons remain as such. So, why is there a difference between these two scenarios?

Well, in a balloon and an airplane, there’s something called Dynamic lift that lifts these two up.

In an airplane, four types of forces are acting on it, the lower one is weight, the upper one is a lift, the forward force is thrust and the backward is a drag.

When the engine’s thrust pushes the airplane forward, the drag pulls it backwards and when the lift pulls it up, the weight of an airplane pulls it down. Since the pressure at the upper end, is higher and that at the lower side is low, this pressure difference between the two ends creates an effective upward force, which is a dynamic lift that lifts the plane up.

So this was the case for an object flying in the sky. Now, let’s discuss what do hydraulic lifters do?

What is a Hydraulic Lifter?

A hydraulic lifter is of two types viz: hydraulic flat tappet lifter and hydraulic roller lifter. A flat lifter looks flat at the bottom and the roller lifter comprises rollers at the bottom, as you can see in two images below:

     (Image to be added soon)                   (Image to be added soon)                  

                 Flat lifter                                                   Roller lifter

A roller lifter is greater in height than a flat lifter. A roller is preferred to a flat lifter in the following ways:

• Though it is costly, i.e., about 7-8 mn dollars but it produces more horsepower than the standard or a flat lifter.

• Rollers at the bottom produce less friction because when they roll on the camshaft, there’s no resistance, so more durability of lifters.

A hydraulic lifter works on the phenomenon of Pascal’s law. You can see a simple diagram of a hydraulic lifter below:

                           (Image to be added soon)

This hydraulic lift is found in service centres, where servicemen lift the car up for repairing. Here, you can see two cylinders connected to each other with a pipe. These two cylinders bear differing cross-sectional areas and each of these is provided with an airtight frictionless piston. 

Let A1, A2 be the cross-sectional areas of two pistons held at the top of these two cylinders, respectively, where A2 >> A1, as we can see that the piston on the left-hand side bears a smaller area as compared to that on the right-hand side.

(Image to be added soon)

Now, these cylinders are filled with an incompressible liquid, as you can in the image below:

(Image to be added soon)

The downward force applied on the left piston is F1 and the pressure exerted on it is:

P = F1/A1

Now, according to Pascal’s law, this pressure is equally transmitted to the small piston of the cylinder on the RHS, so the pressure exerted on it will be:

P = Fg/A2

Since A2 >> A1, therefore Fg > F1.

It means that the force applied to the smaller piston appears as a very large force on the large one. As a result of this heavy load like a car or a motorbike placed on the larger piston is easily lifted upwards.