The only way to do all that work is to put the car
up on jackstands,
and for me to lie under it and do the work. Nothing
is that complicated,
it just takes time. It can be a pain to crawl under
the car, do something,
realize I forgot a tool, crawl back out, get the
tool crawl back under,
and repeat.
That can get tiresome after doing it for a few years.
The answer is
one of these:
It's a Bend Pack MD-60P portable mid rise lift.
While a 2 or 4 post lift
would be better, I can't really use one in my garage
with a 10' ceiling.
Technically, I can fit a 2 post lift in
my garage, but I wouldn't be able
to lift a car very high, because of the garage
door opener. After doing
a lot of research, I decided that the MD-60P would
meet my needs.
I received mine in the middle of December, and,
although I've only
used it a few times, I can tell that I'm going
to love it.
Here are some shots of my car on it.
These shots are with the car on the ground. If
you look at the first
pic, you can see that there are boards under the
car. The lift has a
5" drive over height, but my car is too low for
that. So some 2 X 12 X 15'
boards solve that problem.
These shots show the car on the lift. The lift has
three positions,
low, medium and high. The low position is about
as high as the
would be if it were on jack stands, with the jask
stands were set
in the high position. The medium position is pretty
high, and the
highest setting is about 4' off the ground. While
that doesn't
sound very high, it is when you look at the pictures.
In the picture on the right, you can see how much
room there
is to work on the car. I was worried that the lift
mechanism would
be in the way, but it doesn't seem that likely.
So far, I have had my wife's Volvo 940 wagon up
on the lift
(tire rotation), my Porsche, and my Lincoln Mark
VIII. The
Mark VIII is too long to be lifted with the garage
door closed,
but the lift easily handled that 3800 lb car.
If you want to know more about the lift, shoot me
an email
lenoble@optonline.net