shop safety - lifting

 I now have a back injury - a pulled muscle in my lower back - which hurts like the devil and is severely limiting motion.  I've done this sort of thing in the past, not that it's a good idea mind you, and I expect it will be better "soon" which means it could be magically gone by tomorrow afternoon, or it could still be aching and stiff a week from now.

 The cause was two-fold: yesterday, I removed the rotary table from my mill so I could:

A) tram the head, since I had taken it out of tram to cut something on an angle a while back and

B) figure out where the non-squareness problem was coming from between the rotary table and the vise
(it turned out to be rust on the bottom of the rotary table - to be fair, it came that way and I forgot about it - this thing is not trivial to turn over)

 This involved setting it down on a low storage place, something I should not have attempted alone.

 That alone might have done it, although I hadn't suffered any symptoms today, until... I was again working on the mill and leaning over things, straining my lower back... then suddenly something spasmed and I was in agony.

 Wouldn't it be nice if one could afford to have such things made out of titanium, say, instead of cast iron?  As it turns out, you wouldn't want to do that, because metallurgy and a long explanation I won't go into, but the short answer is that for the purposes of building these specific devices, either steel or cast iron is absolutely desirable, even if we could afford (the much lighter) Ti.

 So either I can only install and remove the rotary with help from another strong person, or I have to get a shop crane of some kind.  I haven't the space for the traditional automotive shop crane, like this:

 Those are cheap, and lift up to 4,000 pounds depending on boom position, but even folded I have no room in my shop for one.

 A much sexier option is the Sky Hook™ line of material handling shop cranes:

 There's a whole range of these things, large and small, with various mounting options for mounting the crane to mills or lathes or other machines, they can also be mounted on rolling floor stands or on carts too.

 It uses a machine (think cyclery) link chain, so the load won't spin. And based on reviews and videos I've seen*, they're well-designed, well-made, and a pleasure to use.

 Unfortunately, they are priced well out of the reach of the average amateur consumer - they are strictly for companies with a healthy material handling / safety budget.  I've saved an eBay search anyway, in hopes that a used one turns up in my local market (they are heavy, I'd rather not ship it) but I am not holding my breath.

 Maybe I'll win the lottery.  Not sure how that works - do you have to buy tickets for that to happen?  ;D

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* reviews and videos about the Sky Hook:
https://youtu.be/mCufgAwqhac
https://youtu.be/sWMmH6coe7M
https://youtu.be/aZItaoyndAc