Mobile auto lifts opened up a whole class of work for an east-central Iowa RV and trailer service shop that could not justify a permanent lift in a bay tall enough to swallow a Class C motorhome. We are Auto Lift Services, and this is a first-year story from install through the twelve-month check-in, written up because the owner said his biggest regret was not having someone else’s story to read when he was planning the build-out. So here is his, with names generalized, but the timeline and the dollar tiers straight from his logbook.
Sized for passenger cars, medium-duty trucks, and RV chassis.
Why an RV shop reached out about mobile auto lifts
The owner runs a family-owned RV and trailer service business in east-central Iowa. He had a big open bay with a fourteen-foot ceiling but no fixed lift, because every quote for a permanent two-post that could clear a Class C at full extension came in over what he wanted to spend and locked him into one spot in the bay. Mobile auto lifts were the direct answer: he could roll a set of four columns around any chassis, pull them out when he needed the whole bay for a slide-out repair, and store them along the wall when they were not in service. The specific job that pushed him over the edge was a triple-axle travel trailer that needed all six wheels off the ground at once for hub service. A pair of floor jacks would have taken all afternoon. Six columns of mobile auto lifts had it in the air in twelve minutes flat.
The pole-building layout we started with
His shop is a 40 by 60 pole building with twelve-foot side walls and a fourteen-foot peak, on a poured concrete slab that had been down for eight years when he called us. The slab was five inches thick, engineered for equipment traffic, which was more than enough for mobile column loads. There were two overhead doors on the long wall and a service door on the end. That layout dictated how we sized his set. Six columns instead of eight, because he did not need the coach capacity of a Class A motorhome. And a wide-enough clear span across the middle bay to let a triple-axle trailer roll straight through if needed. We measured column tow-radius against the door swings, marked out storage lanes with floor tape, and printed a simple layout diagram he taped to the wall. If you want mobile auto lifts to work in a shop like this, the pre-planning is more important than the price sheet.
Column-set sizing for tandem-axle trailers
Sizing a set of mobile auto lifts for an RV shop is different than sizing for a car dealership. Passenger-vehicle sets are almost always four columns. RV and trailer work often wants six, sometimes eight. The math is per-wheel capacity times number of wheels engaged. A set of six mobile auto lifts rated at 18,000 pounds per column can carry a 108,000-pound trailer, which is far more than any triple-axle travel trailer weighs, but the per-column rating is not the only spec. Fork spread matters. Tire diameter matters. The columns need to close in on tires that range from a 15-inch trailer wheel to a 22-inch Class C dually. We spec fork sleeves that fit both. On his set, we included the wide-tire sleeves and the narrow-tire adapters at delivery so his crew never has to hunt for the right hardware mid-job.
Sequencing the build-out: floor first, everything else second
He wanted to add an air-line drop, better overhead lighting, and a compressor upgrade at the same time as the mobile auto lifts. Our advice was blunt: floor first, everything else second. If the concrete needs any patching, saw-cutting, or leveling, do that before the columns show up. He had two small heaves near the man-door that we ground down with a diamond cup wheel before delivery. If we had waited until after the set was on-site, we would have been dodging 900-pound columns with a grinder in hand, and grinding dust would have coated everything. The air drop and lighting went in the week after delivery. That order kept the columns clean and let him charge them on a fresh 20-amp outlet we had the electrician add just for the chargers. Read our full parts lookup if you need to source the same charger receptacles we spec.
Delivery week and the first 30 days
Delivery week was uneventful, which is the best thing you can say about mobile-column freight. The LTL truck arrived on the promised morning, his neighbor brought a rental forklift over, and the six columns were staged inside the shop within forty minutes. He charged all six overnight and we came by the next afternoon to walk him through pairing, the dry cycle, and the first vehicle lift. The first vehicle was a 2019 Ford Transit conversion camper. It came off the concrete for the first time thirty-six hours after the columns landed. In the first thirty days he ran seventeen jobs on the set, ranging from tire rotations to a full trailer axle replacement. Nothing surprised him except how quickly the crew adopted the workflow. Two of his three techs had never touched mobile auto lifts before, and both were competent within a week.
The first six months of tire rotation work
Tire rotation turned out to be the daily bread on the set. RV owners drive their coaches under-inflated, drag trailers with mis-matched tires, and rotate on wildly inconsistent schedules. Once he had mobile auto lifts, he added a spring tire-inspection package that turned into a real revenue line. He could pull all six wheels off a travel trailer at once, spin each tire, check bearing play, torque lug nuts to spec, and set the coach back down inside forty-five minutes. That job used to take him ninety on a floor jack and jack stands. Six months in, tire and wheel work was fifty-eight percent of the lift’s calendar, and he had raised his tire-service ticket by twenty percent because he was doing the job right instead of fast. That is the kind of ROI story we hear over and over from customers who put mobile auto lifts into a shop that was not lift-equipped before.
Twelve-month check-in and what we would do differently
At the one-year mark he had run 312 lifts on the set. Zero service calls beyond the annual paid inspection we schedule at delivery. The only thing he would do differently is he would have added a seventh column as a spare from the start. Our recommendation for anyone in an RV shop is the same: buy one column more than you think you need. Columns can be paired in any combination, so a set of seven functions as either a six-plus-spare or a four-plus-three-column configuration depending on the day. See our two-post lift options if a stationary lift ends up making sense for a second bay, and browse the full mobile column collection for spare-column pricing. Call 800-674-9302 if you want us to walk your shop before you order.
Our Clients Include: