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Old 05-26-2017, 11:41 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dhutton View Post
Glad you got the answer you wanted to hear. Since retiring (Thanks Greg!) I am out in my shop 6 or 7 days a week doing a couple of frame offs per year. I can tell you there is no way I would give up my two post for either of my four post lifts. Too slow and too awkward to work around in my experience. I guess it comes down to what you used first and how you developed your working techniques around the limitations of the lift.

And yes the four post makes an awesome wash rack. I set one up outside under a large 12' high cover for just that purpose.

Don
I appreciate that Don. I agree that it is based on what you are used to working on and how you will be using one. While I love my two post lift, there are a few things about it that make me think a drive on would be better for me at times. For instance, I can not get my lift arms to lift equally on both sides, so the pass side of the car is always a bit higher than the driver side. This doesn't affect you while doing any suspension work on the car, but for ride height setup, corner balancing, alignments, etc it's a huge PITA. I had to build crib stands and level each of them and set the car on those to do any suspension setup work whereas with a level drive on lift it's just drive up and go.

I imagine the raising speed is related to the 110v motors vs the 220v. I've dealt with the slower raising speed on 4 posts before and don't think that will be an issue for me. If anything, the very slow lowering speed of the two post vs the fast drop of the 4 post might make up for that. Unless my 7,000 # truck is on my 2 post, it is VERY slow to come down.

My main concern was how the two sliding jack setups are to work with. If they got in the way constantly, cars got hung up on them and they were hard to get the lift pads in the right areas, that would be a pain in the arse. I thought they looked like this wouldn't be a big issue but wanted to be sure. I KNOW using bottle jacks on the jack trays of the regular drive on lifts is a huge PITA. The only way I would even consider a drive on is to get one with the two sliding powered jacks.

My shop floor will be sloped front to back but should be pretty level side to side, so all I'll need to do is work out a pad to put under the back legs to get the lift level. That shouldn't be too difficult. I can probably work on some way to attach those pads to the floor (adhesives maybe) and have bolts sticking up out of them to just secure the legs in place. This way I can still use the caster kit to roll the lift to a different spot if necessary. Most likely I won't but it's nice to have that option.

It's also nice that the drive on ramps store in between the big lift ramps, more than once I've walked into the ramps hanging off the back of our old lifts...and walked away bleeding.
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