I have googled all the threads about ways to mechanize this process and I'm not going to spend the money for that skyhook thing.
I've NEVER used one, or even seen it in person, but a little bit of quick geometry says that I don't like the way those treat the lathe. It obviously works, but I don't like it. I don't blame you.
I have a 12-foot ceiling height and I keep my chucks on a table at the head of my lathe. was chewing on ordering a 10 foot long, 12 ga section of Unistrut, running it on the ceiling starting at the table on the centerline of the lathe, bolted to trusses every 2 feet.
Unistrut is kinda funny. It's VERY stout, but at the same time, VERY flexy and not stout, and you've really got to consider every aspect of every installation individually, and without being in that room to investigate every related detail- I hope you can respect this when I say that I'm not going to tell you how to build one... I've done that, I've set up a 10 foot (well, 9 foot maybe) by six foot "X-Y" overhead hoist in the "work area" where I tinker on stuff. It can be done, and if done well, it can hold a surprising amount.
Here's some advice that I will give-
I think that if it's well built, it could do exactly what you're asking, and do it well. Make sure it's up well, tested (qualified) at WAY over what you're gonna ever actually do with it. People's opinions about safety ratios varies, but for my contraption, I picked up what I could qualify to an actual, reasonably close weight. I came up with 1500 pounds. 1550 ish actually, and called it fifteen hundred. My contraption successfully lifted that, and traversed all of it's X-Y motions. You could see movement in the strut. Minimal, it'd probably do that for quite a while, but not forever... From there, I rounded to 1500, divided by two, and it was a lot better. Some deflection measurements and some old college books told me that the load/fatigue sycles for that were probably fine occasional home use, but I could still see it move. I don't like that. So I divided by four, and called it a 375 pound max load. What's your comfort zone? Figure that out for your setup, write it on there somewhere, and hold yourself to it. Maximum capacities should not be feared, and maximum lifts should not be approached.
There's not a lot of room inside of a strut channel. There are some pre made trolleys that will pass over "some" small bolts, but for the most part, if you're going to bolt the strut channel to the ceiling, you've got two choices. Either a deeper strut channel, or you're making your own trolley and utilizing smaller bearings. There are "open" hangars so that you could hang the strut below the ceiling, but you give up a significant amount of head space. You might have room to do that if it doesn't "wreck" the rest of the space up there for something else. They also hang from rod, so it's prone to "swinging". I think you'd be happier, provided that everything's reasonably close to straight up there, to have it directly bolted and not hanging.
And then the trolleys. You want eight bearings, not four. You don't need extra weight capacity for this, but strut channel is not as consistent as you would expect it to be. The biggest place that this will bother you, and be (relatively) unfixable, is the rolled up "lip" inside the channel that the bearings ride on. Benefit number one- The extra points of contact smooth that out a lot, so it's not nearly as notchy and jumpy as you roll it along. Benefit two is that they bridge flats and valleys with low PSI, but still hit high spots with most of the load. That leads to an overall "smoothing" or "breaking in" of the running surfaces, so they end up getting better with time. And of course when they "wear in" to bearing on eight bearings all the way, all the time- There's hardly any pressure left on any given bearing (relatively speaking), it's not gonna keep wearing down.
And the weight rating- Some of those trolleys are rated pretty optimistically for what the strut channel is actually capable of on it's best day. Do not mistake what the trolly can hold as being comperable to what the strut can hold. The strut's capacity is 100 percent dependant on your installation of it.
And last- No. No, you are not that good even if you think you are. Even while you're setting up and testing, put an end stop in each end that catches the trolley, NOT the bearings. Make it stout as if it was gonna get used every now and then, and not a "one time emergency device". You will bump it. Make sure it's a non-event when it happens. The plate/body of the trolley doesn't care a bit, but bearings don't like getting smacked into that way.
That said, I do think this will be a very practical solution to the issue you're facing.
