Just my opinion, but I have pretty much thought this one to death.
I hunt in Pennsylvania and I drive a big four wheel drive.
I often times go in and out of trails with my truck and it is hard to get a truck in and out of the woods without a hoist - let alone with something sticking out of the hitch 3 feet, or carrying it in the bed for a couple of weeks while I hunt.
There is a lot of aspects to look at when designing a Jib Crane for a truck.
If you mount it to one bed side - it puts a lot of stress on that sides quarter panel and braces under the bed and causes lots of issues. You see these barrel hoists from time to time in the Harbor Freight paper.
The hitch mount ones is ok - if you can get it big enough to hoist the deer / elk etc high enough to get it in the bed, but in the end, you need a second winch for large animals to pull it into the bed. Even using round tube pipe - it is hard to get it to spin in the bore of a smaller pipe when there is a lot of weight on the hoist.
Third - have you checked the price of new steel lately?
By the time you buy the box steel to go in the receiver and buy the box steel or pipe and plate to make the gusset's and wire or rod to weld and paint - plus a hand winch - you are looking at spending several hundred dollars. It's a lot of money for something you might use once or twice a year.
One or two of the pictures I saw posted didn't look bad, but a bunch of them looked pretty crude - like as if someone was afraid of getting blood on their shop floor or on their driveway.
a 50 lbs deer - you can hang from a branch of your apple tree in your yard, you don't need some fancy skinning post - to do that.
a 1000 lbs elk - the mast style jib crane is going to weigh almost as much as the Elk!
