Auto Lift Pre-Purchase Checklist for Rural Farm Shops

A rural farm shop is one of the harder places to install an auto lift correctly, and the checklist you use before buying decides whether the install day goes smooth or turns into a two-week problem. We are Auto Lift Services, based in Ames, Iowa, and we install lifts in machine sheds and farm shops from Davenport out to the western county lines. Engine oil pan gasket work is a common driver for the purchase because it is one of those jobs a farm owner does not want to send out. This checklist is what we walk through with every rural shop before they sign anything.

Before you buy an auto lift: the pre-purchase checklist

The checklist has seven items and every one of them has broken an install we did not do. Slab thickness. Slab age. Ceiling height at the lowest obstruction. Ceiling height under any overhead door track. Bay length end to end. Power at the panel. Access for the delivery truck. Any farm shop where all seven check out will get a clean auto lift install. Any farm shop missing two or more of them will spend an extra week and an extra thousand dollars getting there. We prefer to catch that before the freight is on the way, which is why we send this list before we send a quote.

A Davenport-area farm shop’s pan-gasket bay

A rural farm shop owner outside Davenport called us about a two-post auto lift so he could stop paying a dealer forty miles away to do oil-pan gasket jobs on his pickups and hired trucks. He had a thirty-by-fifty machine shed, four-inch slab poured two years earlier, fourteen-foot ceilings, and one 220-volt drop that he used for a plasma cutter. The bay length was fine. The plasma cutter was not going to give up its outlet, so we added a second run to the panel. That plus the lift landed him at a full working oil-pan bay for less than what four dealer trips had cost him the year prior.

Concrete slab: what actually matters

A farm shop slab has to hold anchors that resist thousands of pounds of pull-out force. Four inches of concrete over prepared base is the working minimum for a ten-thousand-pound lift. Six inches is what we prefer. If the slab was poured more than a year ago, the strength has settled and you can trust the spec. If it was poured within thirty days, the cure is not complete and the anchor holds a lower load than the number on the datasheet. Rebar and mesh help but they are not the deciding factor. What kills anchors is voids under the pour, and voids are what happen when a slab was poured too fast on unprepared base. Ask your concrete guy how the pour went. His memory is your best data source.

Bay layout for engine oil pan gasket work

Engine oil pan gasket work is a below-the-vehicle job that takes hours, sometimes across two days. You are up under the pan pulling bolts, cleaning gasket surfaces, laying new gasket, torquing. The auto lift needs to sit the vehicle at chest height for you to work overhead, and it needs to hold that position without creep for hours. Not every lift does that. Screw-drive lifts, older two-posts with worn seals, or lifts with a slow leak past the lock rack will drift down under load. On an oil-pan job you cannot have creep. Check the lock system on any lift you are quoting, mechanical rack with visible engagement, not just a hydraulic hold. Our lift safety lock article covers the specifics.

Reach, clearance, and swing arms

Farm shop trucks are wider than passenger cars, and they usually have running boards, side steps, or aftermarket bumpers that get in the way of standard arm pads. A two-post auto lift for a farm shop should have long-reach arms, ideally telescoping to at least sixty-four inches, and the pad heights should stack tall enough to clear rocker panels on a lifted pickup. If you plan to work on farm trucks, ask your supplier for the maximum pad height stacked. If they cannot answer without looking, keep asking until you get a number in writing.

Power at the panel: the checklist item people skip

Almost every commercial-rated auto lift needs 220 volts, single phase, on a dedicated circuit. Farm shops usually have 220 for welders and compressors, which is good, but shared circuits do not work for a lift’s motor start current. Budget a dedicated run from the panel to the lift location, and budget it as a real electrical job with a licensed farm-country electrician. The cost varies by distance from panel and whether you need a new breaker. Have your electrician read the lift’s spec sheet before he quotes. Amp draw at startup is higher than the running amp draw, and he needs to size the breaker for the startup number. See our lift electrical requirements article.

Delivery, install, and first startup

An auto lift ships on a pallet weighing between eight hundred and eighteen hundred pounds. Rural farm shops usually have gravel drives, and a semi with a lift-gate cannot always reach the shed door. We ask every rural customer whether we can offload with a forklift on site, and if not, we schedule a smaller truck with a heavier tail lift. Install runs two people for a day. First startup is a bleed and load test with a known-weight vehicle, and we prefer that a real vehicle sits on the lift the same afternoon so any leak or setting problem surfaces before we leave.