When it came time to raise high the drywall for my ceiling, I put together a pair of quickie drywall lifts out of some pipe-clamp fixtures and 4-ft. lengths of 3/4-in. pipe that I had on site. First I removed the stationary heads from four clamps, leaving only the sliding tail stops. As shown in the drawing, I coupled the pipes together in pairs and mounted them to plywood sheets using pipe flanges. Then I triangulated the pipes with some 1×4 furring strips for rigidity.
I put the sliding tail stops on the top lengths of pipe and spanned the pipes with a 2×4 crosspiece. A 4×4 spacer atop the crosspiece gave me the distance I needed to reach the ceiling joists and brought the plane of the drywall above the ends of the pipe, allowing me to move the drywall around for final adjustment.
To use the lifts I lowered the tail stops to about 4 ft. Then I simply placed the drywall onto the crosspieces and pushed up alternately on the tail stops until the drywall reached the ceiling.
John D. Leonick, Dorset, VT
