Came across this car lift affair yesterday on a stand up at the NEC & wondered what anyone else thought..?
It's drawback is a 125mm lowered height, but I'm thinking of it being kept in situ in the centre of the garage and driving the car in over two scaffold planks or similar to miss the lift.
The other drawback for me is the fact that the wheel rollers would mash the floor up, but thats easily sorted with the use of a couple of steel channels.
Longstone are a well established purveyor of things rubber. Their sales demonstrators are to be commended for "getting down and dirty"!
As for the scissor lift....I am considering one for the garage when we move next year. I hope to set it into the floor with a cover to recess it. All it needs is suitable manmaths during the pre-move mods to the house.
A good number of lift suppliers produce this unit with small changes. Strongmantools stopped selling them for a while as they said certain suppliers who were selling them with very poor welding and they could not compete with the cheaper units.
They have now restarted selling them.
This unit and similar from other makers has poor centre access but gets the car in the air for a good price. Usually 1.2 mtr lift. They are stored on the floor which is a pain. A lot of the units need a small compressor to lift the locking mechanism to lower them to the floor.
Then there are the 1 mtr lift scissor units with two lifting tables and better centre access which are a good bit more expensive, they still have the problem as the one you mentioned of still being on the floor for storage.
Some people cut a slot in the garage floor to get the units out the way but in that case you loose say 120mm of lift and be careful here as these units need to lift a bit before they take any weight.
There was one unit that failed when the user pack it right up between the lift and the underbody and the unit took the load too soon and fractured.
To run a 2 or 4 post you need lots of height and space than you need for these mid lift units.
As always it is what suits your situation.
If you have a concrete apron in front of the garage you can bring this unit out to power wash the underneath where you may not want to do that inside the garage.
This one does not need compressed air to lift the safety locks, that is better.
It lifts to 1.1 mtrs the standard tended to be 1.2 mtrs for these units in the past.
Certification, they claim the unit is CE certified but this is self certification by the manufactuer and the other spec they mentioned was again not certified by an external test house.
If the concrete floor is at least 4" and better say 6" thick not an issue with the wheels.
Getting a car off the ground to do brakes etc is just the business!
