It’s wonderful how many maintenance items on cars can be done from above. Air filters, accessory belts, the dipstick if your car has one, that sort of stuff. However, sooner or later, you’ll need to work on something underneath the car, and that requires raising said car up in the air. Sounds simple enough, but hang on — let’s give this thought for a second.
Decades in the past, body-on-frame, solid-axle cars were easy to lift and support. Even with a crappy bottle jack and a set of axle stands, you can get a Caprice off the ground. However, modern construction means modern lifting techniques, and they can vary substantially from car to car.
Ideally, a unibody car will have central jacking points front and rear, along with two dedicated jacking points on each side of the car so you can raise it up centrally and slot axle stands into the jacking points along the sills. However, sometimes due to construction, that isn’t always an option. Expansive underbody aero trays can make it a pain to slide a jack under the front of a car, and pinch weld jacking points are the bane of every wrencher’s existence. It’s not so much that they require pinch weld adapters to work with flat lifting equipment surfaces, it’s that whoever owned the car before you probably didn’t use them, so now your pinch welds are pancaked.
Oh, and then we get into the more specialty stuff. I’m lucky enough to have lift access and recently helped a friend’s brother out by changing the oil in his Alfa Romeo 4C after getting fleeced by the selling dealer. It was easy enough to get up in the air using a two-post lift (some wood was required), but I couldn’t imagine trying to lift a car with a carbon tub up in the air at home using a jack and axle stands.
So, how do you lift cars up in the air? Are you an axle stand user, a Quickjack devotee, a storage solver with a four-post lift, a baller with a two-post lift, or do you use other equipment like an inspection pit or ramps to access underbody components? What’s more, how easy is it to get your car up in the air? Let’s talk about it, because it’s not a universal one-size-fits-all thing.
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