This is a lot simpler mechanism than the garage door spring would be.
It might take a little experimenting to get the angles and lengths just
right though.
With the garage door spring, assuming you are talking about a spring
that twists and carries the force in torsion, consider this:
The average garage door can be pretty heavy, with a single spring
carrying 100# or more. The garage door moves nearly 7 feet as it opens,
and the spring rotates enough to reel up that much length of cable.
Your lift gate will be lighter, but it will move less as you pick it
up. For instance if you have a 6' long gate and you attach the cable to
the mid point of the gate, as the gate goes from down on the ground to
vertical it will need to reel up only a little over 3 feet of cable. So
for 3 feet of movement it picks up X pounds, for normal garage door use
the spring picks up Y pounds in approximately 7 feet of movement. You
can do the math to get a ballpark spring capacity. You can fine tune it
by moving the connection point closer to or farther from the hinge for
the gate.
> OK, I took a couple photos of the underneath of my trailer. You can see
> how the leaf spring works.
>
> Let me know if you need any more information on it...
>
>
><http://www.megageek.com/photo/photoa~1.nsf/a7ffeab012bbfb5b85256eb1007ca7f6/be104ce66bcf72d4852577ef0005972f?OpenDocument>
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