I'm going all out with it. I'm putting pex throughout because heated floors make me happy. I've got about 2000 square feet of glorious shop space that is little more than storage at the moment because I can't roll **** around in gravel.
I'm very exited to finally be making some headway on it.

 

Yeah, and don't guess the specs based on what people on the internet say. We don't know ****. Pick the lift that you want, go one step higher in weight capacity, call up the manufacturer to ask for their concrete requirements, and build to that.

--Ian

 

Anyone need a USB switcher?

 

I'm not planning on ever lifting a five ton camper, so I think a 9,000 lb unit will work just fine for me.
Thanks for the advice. 6" it is.

 

-Reason #9 I don't use facebook: My wife posted a picture of us from a Christmas party on her account and tagged me in the photo yesterday. She sent a text to me today telling me people she didn't know but I knew were posting replies to it and asking me questions as if I posted it. "Yep, that's how it works," I told her. "You sent an email and possibly a smart phone alert to every single person on my friends list to specially tell them where I was and what I was doing and who with and show them the picture. Hell, I've even been tagged in pictures I was not in just because some dumbass wanted me to see them."

I only go on the damn thing once every 6 weeks but had to go in and I changed my settings. I took a moment to cruise through the "feed" and was not surprised. Stupid **** and old people learning to web. Poorly done political meme, amazon advertisement of the last thing I looked at, love Jesus click like, advertisement, something stupid about Dwayne "the rock" Johnson, advertisement, ISIS/muslims suck meme, advertisement, somebody's stupid kids, credit card advertisement, the Dems want to take your guns meme, somebody's dog in a costume, ---Yep, I'm not missing a chromeplated emmefffing thing by keeping facebook out of my life.

I set almost everything to "me only" and "must be approved by me." And, no, it isn't linked at all to my cellphone. I will not use my phone to access it if I ever do.

/rant

 

I had to block my 81 year old mother because her 'shared' **** was consuming my feed (not that I really had a feed...).

 

I am limited in my garage to how tall the lift can be. I had found a cheap Chinese made lift, and then a USA made lift that would fit what I needed.

I called up the guy who sold the Chinese lift to ask some questions. He pulled over his SUV right away and got out on the side of the road to measure some heights to give me some info I asked about. He then sent me a nice big fat PDF of everything I wanted to know about the lift. He was in Alabama, but the lifts were in a warehouse in Atlanta. I could have it delivered within a week and total cost shipped would be less then $2000.

I then called the company that was in Texas to inquire about the US made lift. It was about $3800 not including shipping, and had a 12 week lead time. The guy who I talked to was not overly helpful with the questions I had. I asked for the manual and they sent me a single 1 page pdf with next to no info on it. So yeah the US company definitely lost out in every way that they could. Besides the US made lift probably being slightly better quality, it was in no way worth the premium over the Chinese one with the shitty customer service, cost, and information they could give me about it.

 

Yup,

I never added family members to my FB. High school friends & current friends only. Though most of them are not 'followed' so I never see what they share. The majority of my feed is select news outlets, cars, miatas, cars, more cars, road racing, local tracks, Dabble of F1 bc COTA, local car group posts, miata group posts, memes, kitties & funny videos.

 

Sometime in 2009-2011 time frame my extended family was getting into the whole FB thing. I kept getting friend requests from aunts and uncles, and I kept denying them all. Come Christmas time they were all asking them why won't I accept their friend requests. Well because I have no desire for all my family to see what I am doing in college all the time. They don't need to see that I drink 3 40's every Friday night. I now laugh at all my cousins who are constantly supervised by our family on FB because they had no back bone to tell family no I won't friend you.

 

I too get asked the same thing at family events , my excuse is that I never use it.

+1 to 40's

 

Chinese lifts are like a lot of the other no-name Chinese products on the market. Some of them are great, some of them are crap, and there's virtually no way to know what you're getting before you buy it. If you're buying a turbo that's one thing -- if it breaks then at worst you're stranded on the side of the road. If you're standing under a lift when it fails, OTOH...

Another thing to consider is long-term support. A lift is not something you buy and throw away in a couple years, it's a significant piece of equipment that I'd expect to last 10-20 years. Obviously there's always a risk of companies going belly up, but I think there's a good chance Bend-pak is still going to be around, and will have parts available for the lift I buy today. I have zero confidence that a no-name Chinese lift manufacturer will be the same.

As for customer support, I will say that my experiences with Bend-pak in no way matched those with your unnamed company. They answered the phone promptly, transferred me to a support guy (who was sitting at a desk, not answering his cell phone wile driving down the freeway), answered all my questions, and referred me to a local dealer through whom I could order the lift (and who could set it up for me if I wanted to pay them to do that). Basically they handled everything in a professional manner, exactly like I expected them to.

--Ian

 

Sounds like my kind of thinking. Friend me?

 

I had an old boss buy a ten year old US made lift and it managed to get my truck stuck up on it the first time we tested it. Needed two new cylinders, wouldn't lift up off the support hooks.

If I remember right that were half the cost of a china lift, and he'd already paid china lift prices for the used thing.



I wonder though, how many parts of a lift are actually specific to that lift. I'd bet it's not a lot, at all. Universal replacement parts for days, it's why all the china lifts look identical, and those look identical to bendpaks. Universal parts

 

Nearly all the lifts I looked at online included a .pdf of site requirements, including pad size, depth of concrete, rebar/mesh requirements and PSI ratings. Also gave recommended ceiling heights and clearances around the posts.

Edit: I also had a very positive experience with Bend-pak, and I called about 3-4 different times asking all sorts of questions about several different lifts. I would have liked to buy one of their models, but it just didn't fit my situation.

 

And rebar. Check websites of potential lift choices for their recommendations.

Also make sure the rebar does not fall where holes will be drilled for the mounting bolts

 

when i built my hangar i knew i'd want a lift, i just didn't know where it would be.... so i had 6" concrete with
rebar poured all over the 60'x60' slab. fast forward to 2/15 and i finally bought a lift. (the hangar was built in
2001.) best thing ever. i got mine from http://www.gregsmithequipment.com. they have a showroom here in atlanta
with all the different models set up. i went with the atlas pv-10p, a 10,000 lb lift since i "might" someday want
to lift the crewcab diesel dually. all that's been on it since february though is miatas. we bought a $800 '93 for
my son that had an automatic transmission with "just" first gear. we had several 5-speeds sitting around that
we could swap in. i went back to greg smith equipment to get a transmission jack. the salesman told me "you
don't want to buy one of ours they leak, go get one from northern tools." so i got this one:
Strongway 2-Stage Telescoping Transmission Jack — 1/2 Ton Capacity | Transmission Jacks| Northern Tool + Equipment
and it made changing the transmission into an easy job. moral of the story, i think the greg smith guys are straight
up. i had mine installed for an extra $500. money EXTREMELY well spent. for that they picked it up at greg smith,
brought it 70 miles to my hangar, and had it up in 3 hours. the installers said that they sometimes have to walk
away because the concrete is so crappy or thin (or both). they tested it with no load and 110v, i had to run the 220v
wiring. i'm retired and not as nimble as i used to be, there's no way i'd give up the lift. go for it.

 

Got bored this morning and decided to look into this.

I took the published specs for the Kernel HR6K-70 scissor lift, and used BluBeam to transpose them onto the dimensional drawing of the underside of an NA based on the image printed in the Mazda bodyshop manual. Then I used that to scale a picture of the underside of a Miata on a 2-post lift provided by FM, and superimposed the lifting pads in red.

This image isn't perfect (the FM picture wasn't precisely plumb, and has a little barrel distortion), but it's probably accurate to within an inch or two:





I'd take that over a 4-post unit, which blocks slightly less width but from front to back, and prevents any sort of brake / suspension work without the use of additional jacks.

 

You also don't live in earthquake country any more.

--Ian

 

What if a vaccine were to be developed... against autism?

 

It would probably cause polio.