Every couple of weeks an Ankeny homeowner texts us photos of a used forward lift somebody is selling on Facebook Marketplace and asks whether it is worth the drive to look at. Most of the time we can tell them yes or no from the photo alone, but the fifty percent where the answer is maybe is where a real pre-purchase checklist earns its keep. If you are a weekend wrencher planning to use the lift mostly for tire rotations, wheel refinishing, and the occasional brake job, the failure modes you need to worry about are different from a commercial buyer. This is the checklist we walk hobbyist buyers through before they hand over cash for something in a stranger’s garage.
If used is not saving you as much as you thought, our new two-post inventory ships direct with a real warranty and full parts availability.
Why used weekend-duty lifts fail differently than commercial ones
A commercial forward lift that gets thirty cycles a day for ten years wears its cables, chains, and arm restraints in a predictable pattern. A garage-queen used lift that got installed by a homeowner in 2011, cycled up and down for two years of active projects, and then sat mostly still for another decade is a completely different beast to evaluate. The two failure modes to watch for on the second one are hydraulic cylinder seal degradation and rubber component dry-rot in the arm restraint pucks and hose ends.
Seals that sit still in old hydraulic fluid — especially fluid that has absorbed moisture over the years — get brittle where they contact the rod and start weeping the first few times you cycle the lift under load. It is not a catastrophic failure, but it means you are buying a lift plus a seal kit plus the labor to install it. Factor that into the price you offer the seller. A used forward lift that has sat for five years should be priced at least a few hundred dollars below one that has been in active hobby use, because the seal work is close to a foregone conclusion.
What to inspect before you drive to see the lift
Before you burn the gas to Ankeny or wherever the seller is, get four specific photos over text. First, a wide shot of both columns from the front showing the base plates seated on the slab. You are looking for shims stacked more than a quarter inch, which suggests a bad floor or an out-of-plumb install that stressed the columns for years. Second, a close-up of the equalization cables where they enter each column, looking for chalky white residue, visible fraying at the swage fittings, or a stiffness that suggests the cables have not moved in years.
Third, a photo of the hydraulic power unit including the model tag and any fluid staining underneath. Fresh fluid staining under a lift that has been sitting means active leaks and probably active seal work in your future. Fourth, a photo of the arm restraint pucks or gears on all four swing arms. Cracked, missing, or clearly aftermarket restraint components on a forward lift are a red flag for both age and how the seller has maintained it. If those four photos come back clean, the drive is probably worth it. If any of them look sketchy, get a lower price locked in over text before you go so you have room to walk if in-person inspection turns up more.
The cylinder seal question, in plain English
Hydraulic cylinder seals are the number-one reason a used forward lift arrives at a hobbyist’s garage and immediately underperforms. There are usually two cylinders on a two-post — one in each column — and each has a rod seal, a piston seal, a wiper, and a couple of static seals. A rebuild kit for a specific model runs modest money in parts. The labor to actually get to those cylinders, though, involves lowering the carriages, disconnecting the equalization system, disconnecting the hydraulic hoses, dropping the cylinders out, cracking them open on a bench, cleaning everything, and reassembling with fresh seals and clean fluid.
A first-timer will spend a Saturday on it. Somebody who has done a few will spend two hours. If you are a weekend wrencher who enjoys the project side of that work, buying a used lift with tired seals and rebuilding them yourself is a legitimate value play. If you want the lift running by next weekend so you can rotate the tires on your family fleet, buy new or buy from a seller who has already done the seal work and has fluid receipts. We have watched more than one buyer talk themselves into a rebuild project that ended up taking three months of intermittent evenings because the parts had to ship from three different suppliers.
Cables, chains, and the failure that actually hurts you
Equalization cables are the safety-critical wear item on almost every two-post. On some designs it is chains instead of cables, and the inspection logic is similar. What you are looking for is uniform tension when the lift is at full extension, no visible corrosion at any point along the run, no fraying at the swage fittings on either end, and no chalky white lubricant migration where the cable enters a sheave. On a used forward lift with cables that pass all four of those tests, you have a couple of years of hobby use before you need to touch them.
On cables that fail even one of those tests, you replace them before the lift takes weight, because a cable failure at full extension is the failure mode that hurts you and the vehicle. Cable pairs are not expensive as parts. The labor to swap them is manageable if you are patient and follow the manufacturer procedure. Do not skip re-tensioning at multiple heights after install, and do not skip cycling the lift a dozen times empty before you put a vehicle on it. This is the single item on our checklist we will not let a customer negotiate down: if cables are questionable, they get replaced before the first tire rotation.
Concrete, electrical, and the rest of the site work
Even a perfect used forward lift is only as good as the slab you are anchoring into and the power you are feeding it. Weekend wrenchers in Ankeny tend to have decent garages — most are on four-inch to six-inch slabs poured within the last twenty-five years, which is generally adequate for a two-post rated at seven to ten thousand pounds. If your slab is older, cracked visibly across the anchor footprint, or unknown thickness, get a couple of core samples pulled or have us come look at it before you commit to the used lift purchase.
Electrical is usually simpler: most residential garages either have a 240V drop already or can get one added by a licensed electrician for a few hundred dollars. If the used lift comes with a control box wired for a specific circuit configuration, make sure your electrician has the model spec sheet before quoting the job, because control-box amperage varies more than most homeowners assume. The last item is anchor hardware. Do not reuse the anchors that came out of the previous install — buy fresh wedge anchors sized to the manufacturer spec and torque them to the published value. This is a fifty-dollar item that people constantly try to reuse and regret.
What a fair used price actually looks like
Used two-post pricing in Iowa is all over the map because sellers price on emotion and buyers underprice on hope. As a rough anchor, a hobbyist-owned forward lift ten to fifteen years old that has been maintained, has clean cables, no visible cylinder leaks, and includes disassembly and loading help should sell in a modest four-figure range depending on capacity and configuration. Above that price you are competing with new options that come with warranty, install support, and parts availability we can back up.
Below that price you are probably looking at a lift that needs cables, seals, or both, and you need to budget the parts and labor into your effective purchase price. Where buyers get burned is paying near-new prices for a lift that is really a rebuild project in disguise. Where sellers get burned is asking new-lift money for a fifteen-year-old lift with dried-up seals and cables past their service life. We help customers on both sides of this trade every month — sometimes it is walking a buyer through what to offer, sometimes it is helping a seller price honestly so their listing actually moves.
When used is not the right call and new makes more sense
Two clean signals push buyers away from used and toward new. First, if your project timeline is short and you need the lift running within a few weekends, the used market’s chaos is likely to eat that timeline. New ships from our warehouse on a known schedule and installs on a booked date. Second, if you are new to lift work and you do not have a mentor who has installed or rebuilt one before, buying used means you are simultaneously learning to inspect, learning to rebuild, and learning to use the lift safely. That is too many new skills at once for most weekend wrenchers, and the temptation to skip a step goes up with every hour of frustration.
Buying new means the lift arrives working, the install is professional, and your learning curve is limited to using it well. That is a legitimate reason to skip the used market entirely, and it is what we recommend to most first-time Ankeny buyers who ask us. If you want to see the actual product side of things first, our related articles on home-garage buyer basics and seal replacement in the field both walk further into the topic.
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