A Council Bluffs overlanding builder — the kind of guy who spends weekends bolting long-travel coilovers onto a mid-size pickup and disappears into the Nebraska Sandhills for a week at a time — called us to install a lift in his new shop. He had been working suspension jobs on a low-rise scissor and hated every minute of it. Automotive two post lifts were the answer, but only if the pole barn was ready for one. This is the case study from that build, from first phone call to first shock swap on the new lift.
Delivered and installed across Iowa and eastern Nebraska.
The Council Bluffs overlanding build
The customer’s build was a mid-size four-door pickup with a 3-inch lift, 35-inch tires, long-travel front coilovers, and a leaf-pack upgrade in the rear. Every one of those systems is a wear item on the trails he runs, and he was pulling shocks or realigning something almost every month. His old scissor lift got the truck two feet off the ground, which was enough to change oil but nowhere near enough to swap coilovers with a proper stroke of arm room. Automotive two post lifts get the wheels off the ground and put a technician in a real working posture underneath. That was the fix he had been avoiding because he assumed his pole barn was not ready. We told him to send us photos and dimensions before we assumed anything.
Why suspension work punished his old low-rise
Suspension and shock work on a lifted truck requires the wheels to hang freely. That means the lift has to pick up the frame, not the tires. Scissor lifts and drive-on ramps hold the tires, which compresses the suspension at exactly the wrong time. Automotive two post lifts grip the frame at four pad points and let the wheels swing to full droop. Coilover swaps that take an hour on a two-post can take three or four on a scissor because the tech is fighting compressed springs the whole time. Every minute he saved on his personal truck compounded across the dozen friend-of-a-friend builds he was doing on the side.
Site walk-through: pole barn, 12-foot walls
His pole barn measured 30 by 40 feet with 12-foot sidewalls. The ceiling ran open truss up to about 15 feet at the peak but only about 11 feet 8 inches at the wall. The lift bay he planned sat about 8 feet in from the sidewall, which put him under a truss chord at roughly 12 feet 2 inches. That was enough for a baseplate automotive two post lift but not enough for an overhead. He initially wanted overhead. We showed him the shutoff bar height math and he changed his mind on the spot. The floor was a mystery — the previous owner had poured it, and there were no records. We planned a core sample as step one.
The pour we specified
The core came back at 3.75 inches over a poorly compacted base. That was not enough for a 12,000-pound automotive two post lift, which was the capacity he wanted for future truck work. We had two choices: downsize to 10,000 pounds and accept the existing slab, or saw-cut a lift-bay-sized section and re-pour. He chose to re-pour. We saw-cut a 16-foot by 12-foot section around the planned lift footprint, excavated to 8 inches, laid compacted road base, added rebar on 12-inch centers, and poured 6 inches of 4,500 PSI concrete. Total cost with his own labor came in around $2,400. Cure time was 28 days, which he used to run electrical, hang lighting, and finish the parts wall behind the future lift. Sequencing the pour first is the difference between a rock-solid install and a callback in year three.
Rigging day
The 12,000-pound columns arrived on a Wednesday. Each column weighed close to 600 pounds. He met us with a skid-steer, which made the walk-in trivial — we lifted each column off the truck with straps and set them within a foot of their final position. Anchor layout took about forty-five minutes with a laser level. We drilled the wedge anchor holes with a hammer drill, torqued them to 90 foot-pounds, and dropped the crossbeam by noon. Hydraulic hose routing ran along the back of the driver’s-side column and connected to a power unit mounted on the wall three feet away. Total install day, from truck arrival to first cycle test, ran nine hours. He was on the lift the next morning.
First shock swap on the new lift
The first job on the new automotive two post lifts was a front coilover swap on his own truck. He timed it. Wheels off, coilover unbolted, out of the truck, new one in, torqued to spec, and wheels back on: 52 minutes per side. On the scissor, the same job had been running him close to three hours per side because of the fight with compressed springs. That first swap paid back roughly seven hours of labor over a full weekend of maintenance he had planned. Two months later he sent us a photo of the truck at a Sandhills camp with the caption “paid for itself already.” We do not usually take credit for a good weekend, but that one felt earned.
What we would repeat, what we would not
Two things worked well: the decision to re-pour rather than downsize the lift, and the decision to run baseplate instead of forcing overhead into a ceiling that could not carry it. Two things we would change: he would have added a bay heater before install rather than after, because working under a lifted truck in a 30-degree pole barn is a mood-killer, and he would have installed a second overhead light bar on the passenger side because shadows from the driver-side lights fall right on the differential every time. Both are minor. If you are planning your own Council Bluffs or western Iowa install and want us to survey your building, the free site survey travels farther west than most people expect. Automotive two post lifts are cheaper to install right the first time than to fix later.
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