If you farm outside Iowa City and you are pricing automotive two post lifts for the pole barn where your pickup, your daughter’s Civic, and the neighbor’s grain-cart tractor all end up on the same afternoon, the checklist we walk you through is different from what a downtown body shop needs. We are Auto Lift Services in Ames, and about a quarter of our two post installs go into working farm shops. This guide is the pre-purchase list we hand those owners before we ever quote a lift, so you avoid the callback where the door will not close over the columns.
Rotary and Challenger, symmetric and asymmetric, 9,000 to 18,000 lb capacities in stock and shipping direct.
Measure the shop before you shop the lift
The first mistake we see on farm-shop calls is browsing capacity before measuring the building. Every pole barn we visit has different clear ceiling height because the truss chord depth eats two to fourteen inches under the ridge line. Stretch a laser from the finished floor to the underside of the lowest bottom chord, not to the peak. For most automotive two post lifts you want 11 feet, six inches clear to run the standard overhead. Anything less and we push you to a baseplate model that routes hydraulic lines through a bar across the floor instead of a beam overhead. Then measure the two door openings and how they swing. An overhead door track adds another three to five inches into the room. Write those three numbers on paper before you look at capacities, because they eliminate about half the lifts on the market for you and it is much cheaper to know that up front.
Exhaust and driveline access is the whole point
Farm-truck exhaust work is why you want a two post over a four post. Dropping a header, tightening a leaking Y-pipe on the diesel, or pulling a driveshaft to rebuild a U-joint all need the wheels hanging free. Automotive two post lifts give you 360-degree access around the drivetrain and let you drop the whole exhaust as a single piece, which you cannot do on a four post drive-on. When you are looking at arm designs think about how deep the frame rail sits on your Super Duty or your dually. Triple-telescoping front arms reach in around a wide track, and stackable pad adapters take you from a low-slung passenger car up to a lifted three-quarter-ton without swapping hardware. That combination is the difference between a 12-minute exhaust hanger job and an hour of dragging a jack around.
Concrete under a pole-barn slab
A lot of Iowa pole barns were poured with four inches of 3,000 psi concrete and no rebar, which is not enough for a heavy two post anchor. Manufacturers want 4.25 inches of 3,000 psi minimum for 10,000 lb machines, and 6 inches for anything above 12,000 lb. If your slab is thinner or was floated on a wet subgrade, we can core-drill and confirm before install day, or we can pour a reinforced pad in the two footprints where the columns land. We would rather build you a pad than watch an anchor pull under load. Ask us to include a pad quote in your automotive two post lifts number if you have any doubt about the slab depth or whether the pour was reinforced.
Capacity is not just the vehicle weight
A one-ton pickup can weigh 8,200 pounds empty. Add a full fuel tank, a bed of firewood, a topper, and the weight on the arms is climbing past 9,000. If your primary use is farm trucks we push you to 12,000 lb capacity as a floor, not 10,000. The extra hydraulic and steel margin is a couple hundred dollars, and it lets you park a heavier truck on it without white-knuckling the switch. For automotive two post lifts sitting between the light passenger cars and the heavy trucks you drag home, size for the heaviest thing you will ever set on it plus 15 percent, not for the average.
Symmetric or asymmetric for a mixed shop
Symmetric columns face each other straight on and the arms are equal length front and rear. Asymmetric columns rotate about 30 degrees and use shorter front arms with longer rear arms, which pushes the vehicle balance point behind the columns and gives you door clearance to open a car all the way. For a farm shop that swings between pickups and passenger cars, we usually spec asymmetric because the door clearance matters more than the truck. If you only work on trucks, symmetric is fine and slightly cheaper.
Anchoring, wiring, and a plumb column
Install day for automotive two post lifts is one strong helper, four hours, and a rotary hammer with a 3/4-inch bit. We come with the drill and the anchors, but the electrical is on you. You need a 220-volt single-phase circuit on a 30-amp breaker within reach of one column, or 208 three-phase if you have shop-grade service. Never wire a two post through an extension cord. On leveling, we shim under the base plates before torquing the anchors, then run the lift to full height loaded and re-check plumb. A column out by half a degree at the floor is inches out at the top, and it will wear cables and slides fast.
What we install, what we ship, and what to ask us
We stock Rotary and Challenger for commercial-tier automotive two post lifts and BendPak and Atlas for home-shop tier. All of them are on our storefront with real capacities, arm styles, and cutsheet dimensions. If you want us to look at a photo of your building and tell you what fits, send it. If you want a truck to the door in central Iowa, we do that too. We also stock hydraulic cables, sheaves, and locking-latch parts for every brand we sell, so you are not stranded eight years in when a cable stretches. Related reading on our site: the two-post buying guide, our concrete requirements piece, and the asymmetric vs symmetric breakdown.
Our Clients Include: