Here's my Roof Hoist story:
It took a couple of weeks of debating with myself about different ways of doing this, but I finally came up with a rigging to remove the roof of my 230SL singlehandedly. My objectives included low cost, simple, safe, and low cost. (Oh! Did I say that twice?) The plan was to use the rigging to remove the roof, move the car back fifteen feet, slowly drop the top to the floor and roll it away on the stand. NOT to leave it suspended, which in my reading of the W113 forum, sounds like a risky play.
Part of the challenge was how to "bolt it" into the ceiling. If you look closely at the photos below, you can see there is a steel "triangular prism" frame that supports the floor above and there is no wood in the construction. I took a heavy duty C-Clamp ($6) and bolted it around the strut of the prism at a point in one of the supports where it would not slide. I debated about then using a winch and chain hanging from this. In my research I discovered a pulley system that reduces the load by a factor of seven. The 100 pound roof would require about 15 pounds of pulling power -- a child could do it. (The pulleys were only $15 on eBay, where the main demographic for them appears to be hunters needing help to lift their spoils.)
The ratchet tie-downs (mini-winches) cost $11. The roller part can only hold about three feet of material so I had to cut off about ten feet to get it to work for this application.
I added a heavy duty swivel ($7) in case I don't park perfectly.
The critical part was attaching it to the car. I considered wood bars under the roof, but my friend @jpinet of this forum strongly advised me to use the "gutter" style roof rack which are generally NLA because car roofs don’t have gutters anymore! There were used ones on eBay (Yakima) which cost me $75 shipped. (Maybe they are available cheaper, but not by much from what I could see. These are a nice clean set.) I believe that by attaching four to the roof, two of them are almost like a safety backup to the main two which are as far to the rear as I can get them. I could probably do it with just the two near the rear, but it is safer with four.
All this worked like a charm. I started pulling on the rope and the roof came right up. I suspended it just above the top of the windscreen and backed the car out. Then I slowly lowered it to the ground and mounted it onto the rolling cart. Finally, I tied up the rigging and put it out of the way (after removing the mini-winches and putting them in a cabinet).
One of the advantages to this setup is that I can stand right next to the car while lifting the roof giving more control over the operation. I also like that it is non-invasive (easily reversible?) which means that my landlord will not have a problem with it because of this.
The entire rigging cost me about $115, a reasonable amount to be sure.
