Will it work as a hoist? Absolutely. This thing had no problem picking up my kids, even two at a time. (Never mind that it also picks up hogs and more just fine, too.) The winch can be set to ratchet in both up and down directions, as well as free spin. The pivot looks works just fine under load, and definitely swivels 360 degrees....but there is some weirdness here, and I’m not sure how avoidable it all is. First, my truck gate won’t flip down all the way unless the gambrel is swiveled at least 90 degrees. The tailgate actually hits the winch otherwise. On the one side, that’s a pain in the butt. On the other hand, you wouldn’t be able to swing your meat all the way onto the truck otherwise.The whole machine is broken up into a number of clever pieces, meaning that the box you receive (or store it in) can be significantly smaller than the assembled structure. ...but you might not want to do that. See, the pulleys that the cable and hook go over are too small for the hook that holds the gambrel, which means that you have to set up the cable by passing it winch-end first through everything. That’s not a big deal. ...but if you want to take it apart then you kinda need to take that cable back off in its entirety or risk a kinked up rats’ nest when you want to put it all back together. The cable is 25-30’ long, which is WAY longer than it needs to be and just takes a long time to wind or unwind.The foot isn’t just one sliding foot that inserts into the mounting arm that goes in your trailer hitch. There’s an intermediate piece. This allows you to easily fit it from any standard height up to a lifted truck. (It’s like a telescopic arm you pin to the height you need.) That’s a clever touch, even if it makes things a bit more fidgety. Unfortunately, mine seems to only fit in one way and can get stuck if I put it in the wrong way. I don’t know if one or both pipes aren’t true somehow or if the tolerance is just a funny gap that allows it to twist just enough. Either way, it only seems to happen one direction.Shipping large, heavy chunks of metal isn’t easy, and they do a pretty good job of having everything zip tied nice and snug when you get the hoist so it isn’t all banged up. ...but as you can see from my pictures, not only was it banged up and missing some sizeable chunks of enamel, but actually *rusted* in spots. Now, I don’t expect that to cause a huge problem for me, because the rust isn’t in places that seem critical, but it shows that the hoist isn’t exactly treated with kid gloves at any point in its journey.In the interest of fairness, I should point out that I picked this up because I thought about building a trailer hitch gambrel hoist myself but couldn’t have done it as inexpensively as this one. Could I have made it better? Maybe. Could I have done it without it being all beat up before I got to use it? Definitely.I’d still recommend the hoist, but I think it’s important to at least know where you’re cutting corners when you buy the cheapest trailer hitch gambrel hoist on Amazon.