Vehicle Storage Lifts: A West Des Moines Overlanding Install

An overlanding builder in West Des Moines called us last fall about vehicle storage lifts for a detached three-car garage he had just finished building on the back of his property. He wanted to daily-drive a lifted Bronco, do all his own suspension and shock work at home rather than paying a shop, and keep a project rig parked underneath for the winter. He had done his homework on models but had not done the site prep, and the site prep is what ended up shaping half the decisions we made together. This is the case study of that install from the first site survey through the first job he ran on the lift a month after commissioning.

Site survey as the starting point

The first thing we did was drive out and walk the garage with a tape measure, a hammer drill, and a torpedo level. The building was 24×36 with 10-foot sidewalls and a single 16-foot-wide overhead door on the short end. His plan on paper was to put the lift in the middle bay and drive straight in from the door. In practice the door was slightly off-center from the building axis, which meant the lift would need to be shifted about six inches toward the far wall to give the vehicle a straight drive-on path. That six-inch shift was the first of about a dozen small adjustments that ended up defining the install.

Site surveys matter more for vehicle storage lifts than most people expect because a 4-post lift has a fixed footprint and a fixed drive-on geometry. You cannot install it slightly crooked and then straighten it out with skill. Either it lines up with the door or you back a truck onto it at an angle every time. The half hour we spent chalking the slab in his garage saved him an hour of frustration every time he drove the rig on. That is a return worth paying for on the front end.

Slab test and rebar check

The garage was less than a year old, which meant the slab was fully cured, but we still ran a hammer drill test at each of the four planned column locations. The concrete came back at a full four inches and a quarter, with visible rebar at three of the four spots. At the fourth spot the drill bit went through into what felt like a gap or void. That kind of finding is unusual on a residential slab but not unheard of when the pour was rushed or the sub-base was not compacted evenly. We shifted the column position 18 inches, redrilled a test, hit solid concrete, and moved on.

The takeaway from that survey is worth restating for anyone else about to install vehicle storage lifts in a residential garage. Do the drill test before the delivery truck is scheduled. If the slab fails at the planned column locations, you have options: shift the layout, add a reinforcing pad, or in the worst case saw-cut and re-pour. All of those options exist only if you find the problem before the lift is in your driveway on a pallet. Find it after and you are storing a lift in your garage while you schedule a concrete crew.

Suspension work clearance dimensions

His primary use for the lift was suspension and shock work on his Bronco and a project Wagoneer he had lined up for the spring. Suspension work is one of the two or three jobs where the specifics of the lift geometry matter a lot. To pull front coilovers on a Bronco, you need the front wheels hanging free, which on a 4-post lift requires a rolling bridge jack that lifts the axle off the runway. We spec that jack as part of the package for any customer doing regular suspension work, and we specced it for him without discussion.

The other clearance dimension for suspension work is side-to-side room between the columns. On some vehicle storage lifts the column spacing is set for passenger cars and gets tight when you are trying to swing a control arm out on a full-width truck. We ordered a wide-frame model for this install specifically because the Bronco with 37-inch tires and stock flares was close to the max the standard width would clear. That specific dimension is on every manufacturer spec sheet under drive-through width. Read it. Assume you might buy a wider vehicle in five years. The extra column spacing does not cost more meaningfully at order time and cannot be added later.

Column placement decisions

Once the slab was verified and the width was chosen, we chalked the exact column positions on the concrete and walked through the workflow with him for twenty minutes before drilling anything. Column placement decisions on vehicle storage lifts are irreversible in a practical sense. The anchors go into the concrete, and once they are set, moving the lift means drilling four new holes and permanently marking the slab. So the twenty minutes of chalk-and-walk is time well spent, and it is where we caught the two things we changed from his original plan.

First, we shifted the whole lift six inches toward the side wall to give him a clear walking lane on the workbench side. He had planned to run his workbench along the same wall as the powered column, and without that shift he would have had 22 inches of walking clearance, which is tight. Six inches over gave him 28 inches, which is comfortable. Second, we rotated the powered column so the controls faced the walk-in door rather than the back wall. Small change, and now he can see the controls from the door as he walks in with a coffee at seven on a Saturday morning. Little decisions like that compound over years of use.

Electrical prep before delivery

His garage was wired for 120-volt on all outlets, which is standard for a residential detached garage. The lift he chose came in either 120 or 240, and we recommended he upgrade to 240 before the delivery. The reasoning is that a 240-volt power unit runs the lift faster and hotter under load, which matters when you are cycling the lift up and down half a dozen times in a single afternoon. On a 120-volt unit the cycle time between full down and full up can be closer to a minute, and the motor gets warm under repeated cycling. The 240 unit halves that and stays cool.

His electrician ran a 30-amp dedicated circuit to the planned power-unit location, on the same wall as the panel, in about an afternoon. Total cost was manageable. If he had waited until after the lift was installed and then decided to upgrade, the run would have required either fishing wire through a finished ceiling or running conduit across the outside of the garage. Neither is cheap or clean. Wire the bay before the lift arrives, even if you buy the 120 version, so the future upgrade path exists. That is the recommendation we make on essentially every residential install for vehicle storage lifts now.

Install day breakdown

Install day itself took two of us about six hours from the moment we opened the first crate until the moment we handed him a set of keys and a manual. That timing is roughly typical for a clean install of vehicle storage lifts in a residential garage with a good slab and no surprises. About 90 minutes went to unpacking and staging, about 90 minutes to erecting columns and setting anchors, about 90 minutes to running cables and connecting hydraulics, and the final 90 minutes to leveling, testing, and running him through the operating checklist.

The specific step that took the longest was cable routing. Cables on a 4-post lift have to be tensioned evenly across all four corners, and getting that first tension right requires patience. Most first-time installers rush this step and end up with a runway that sits a quarter inch out of level, which loads the safety ladders unevenly. We took the extra 20 minutes on his install to get all four cables within an eighth of an inch, and the lift has held level in the six months since without adjustment. That is the payoff for slow work on install day.

First-week workflow observations

He called us a week after install with two questions, both of which were the kinds of questions any new lift owner has and none of which were problems with the lift. First, he asked whether it was normal to hear a click from the safety ladders as the lift raised. Yes, it is. That is the pawl skipping over the ladder rungs, and it is exactly the sound the lift is supposed to make. Second, he asked whether it was safe to leave the Bronco parked on the lift overnight without engaging the ladders. No, it is not. Always engage the ladders before you walk away.

Those two questions are worth writing down because they represent the actual learning curve for someone who has never operated vehicle storage lifts before. The mechanics are simple. The habits are what take a week or two to build. Engage the ladders every time. Check the level monthly. Grease the cables per the manual. Do those three things and the lift will run 20 years without meaningful trouble. Skip them and the lift will still work, but it will develop problems that could have been avoided. He is now a month past the shock job that was the first real use of the lift, and by his description it took a third of the time it would have taken on ramps.