Automotive Two Post Lifts for Race Teams: Used vs New Decision Tree

A crew chief running a dirt late model program out of northern Missouri called us last spring with a problem we hear constantly: he needed to pull hubs and repack wheel bearings between Friday and Saturday night features, his floor jack routine was eating two hours per corner, and he had roughly the budget of a decent set of tires. He wanted to know whether automotive two post lifts were realistic at that number, or whether he should keep saving. We walked him through the same decision tree we use with every caller — budget first, then vehicle weight, then ceiling and floor, then used versus new. That order matters, because getting it backwards is how people end up with a lift that will not fit or will not pass an anchor pull test.

Start With Budget, Not With Capacity

Most people start the conversation with capacity because it feels like the technical question. It isn’t the useful one. A race team hauling a 2,700 lb late model and a 6,000 lb tow rig is nowhere near the limit of even the smallest column lift on the market. Starting with budget instead tells us which shelf we are shopping on, and that shelf determines almost everything else. The bottom shelf is a value-brand baseplate unit — thinner columns, simpler carriage bearings, basic arms. The middle shelf is where most serious hobby and small-shop buyers land. The top shelf is Rotary and Challenger commercial iron, which is what dealerships and heavy-cycle shops buy because the duty cycle justifies it.

For the crew chief, the honest answer was that his number put him on the bottom-to-middle boundary. We told him what that buys and what it doesn’t: it buys a functional lift that will raise a race car and a pickup safely, and it does not buy fast arm adjustment, premium powder coat, or the kind of pad set that makes low-profile unibody cars easy. We laid out three tiers with ranges rather than exact figures, because freight and anchoring costs swing a project by a meaningful amount depending on where in northern Missouri the shop sits. Once he knew the tier, the rest of the tree collapsed quickly, and we stopped wasting his time on equipment he was never going to write a check for.

Wheel Bearing Service Changes the Arm Requirement

Wheel bearing and hub work is the specific job that separated the models on his short list. When you are pulling a hub, you want the car high, stable, and with nothing in the way of a slide hammer or a press setup rolled up next to the tire. That argues for a symmetric or asymmetric two post rather than a four post, because the wheels hang free and you have an unobstructed swing around each corner. It also argues for a lift with truck adapters or screw-up pad extensions, since a race car with a low frame rail and a lifted tow truck need very different pad heights from the same arms.

The other detail that matters for hub work is arm restraint quality. Cheap gear-and-pawl arm restraints wear, and worn restraints let arms creep under side load — exactly the load you generate hammering on a stubborn hub. We tell teams to look for a restraint that engages positively at every arm position, not just a spring-loaded plate that relies on friction. On automotive two post lifts in the middle tier, this is usually a hardened gear ring with a locking pin. It is a small hardware difference that shows up two years in, when one lift still holds its arms exactly where you set them and the other has developed a habit of drifting. If you are cycling a lift four times a night in the shop between races, that difference is not cosmetic.

Used Automotive Two Post Lifts: When It’s a Deal and When It’s a Trap

We get asked about used equipment weekly, and our answer is not a blanket no. A used commercial-grade lift from a shop that closed can be a genuinely good buy — the columns are structural steel, and structural steel does not wear out from sitting there. What wears out are cables, sheaves, hydraulic cylinders, hoses, arm restraints, and safety locks. If the seller can show you a lift that was inspected annually and you can source those parts, a fifteen-year-old Rotary two post can outlast a new bottom-shelf unit by a decade. That is a real scenario and we have helped customers do exactly that.

The trap looks like this: no brand tag, no model number, no manual, and a seller who says it “works fine.” Without a model number you cannot order cables, and cables are the single most common wear item on automotive two post lifts. We have had people buy an orphan lift for a few hundred dollars and then discover that nobody makes the equalizer cable for it anymore, which turns a bargain into scrap metal in a corner of the shop. Second trap: hidden anchor damage. If a used lift was pulled out of a floor that had cracked around the base plates, the mounting holes may be elongated or the base may be tweaked. Ask for photos of the columns standing before disassembly, ask for the serial tag, and price in a full cable and lock rebuild before you decide it’s cheaper than new.

Concrete Is the Veto Vote

A shop owner about two hours from the crew chief told us his floor was “about five inches, maybe less.” That single sentence changes the whole plan, and it comes up in roughly a third of our calls. Most two post lifts in the 9,000 to 12,000 lb range specify a minimum of four inches of 3,000 PSI concrete, and some require more depending on capacity and column footprint. “Maybe less” means somebody needs to core or drill a test hole before anchors go anywhere. Pole buildings poured in stages are notorious for thin spots near the perimeter, exactly where people want to park a lift to keep the center bay open.

If the slab does not measure up, you have options and none of them are “just anchor it and hope.” You can cut and pour footing pads at each column — typically a squared section a few feet on a side, doweled into the existing slab and poured to depth. You can relocate the lift to a thicker section of floor. Or you can go to a four post, which distributes load through runways and does not depend on anchors the same way. We would rather have the awkward conversation about a saw-cut and a concrete truck up front than get a call six months later about a base plate that has lifted a quarter inch off the floor. Anchors in thin concrete are the single most dangerous shortcut we see in the field, and it is entirely preventable with a drill and ten minutes.

Baseplate vs Overhead in a Race Shop

The crew chief’s building had a ceiling around eleven feet with a truss below that, which put him in baseplate territory. That is fine — baseplate lifts have gotten good, and the floor plate is far less of a nuisance than people imagine once you get used to rolling a jack over it. The advantage is obvious: nothing above the car, so you can raise a tall tow rig or a hauler cab to full height without worrying about the crossbar. For teams working out of a building with a low truss or a hoist track already installed, baseplate is often the only real answer.

Overhead models put the equalizer assembly and hoses in a crossbar between the columns, which keeps the floor completely clear and generally gives you a cleaner-looking bay. The trade is height: you need enough clearance that the crossbar sits above whatever you plan to lift, and the published overall height on many overhead units runs eleven to twelve and a half feet. One caller in North Dakota had a hard 139-inch ceiling limit and needed a baseplate for exactly this reason. We ask for the measurement from finished floor to the lowest obstruction — not to the peak, not to the truss bottom, to the lowest thing in the way, including door tracks, lights, and heater hoses. Get that number wrong and the lift you ordered becomes an expensive lesson in tape measures.

What Install Actually Involves, and When to DIY

Plenty of people install their own lift and do a fine job of it. If you have a forklift or a telehandler, two capable people, a rotary hammer, and a torque wrench, standing columns and setting anchors is well within reach for a mechanically confident owner. Where DIY installs go sideways is in the details: shimming the columns plumb, setting the equalizer cables to equal tension, verifying the safety locks engage simultaneously on both sides, and doing a proper cycle and load test before the first car goes up. Those steps are where a professional install earns its money, and skipping them is how you end up with a lift that racks slightly every cycle and chews through cable.

We install across Iowa and into the surrounding states, and we also sell to people who explicitly do not want install — the North Dakota caller mentioned above told us straight out that he would handle it himself, and that was a perfectly reasonable call. What we always recommend, DIY or not, is an annual inspection. ALI guidance calls for a qualified inspection once a year, and for automotive two post lifts in a race shop cycling many times a week, that is the bare minimum. We check cables for broken strands and stretch, locks for engagement, arm restraints for wear, cylinders and hoses for seepage, and anchors for torque. Read our related pieces on two post lift cable replacement warning signs and car lift concrete requirements before you finalize anything.

Working the Tree to a Final Answer

Here is how the decision tree resolved for the crew chief. Budget put him at the top of the value tier or the bottom of the middle. Vehicle weight — a race car, a crew truck, and occasionally a friend’s diesel — pointed to 10,000 lb capacity, which is where the widest selection and best pricing live anyway. Ceiling measured 132 inches to the bottom of a light fixture, so baseplate. Concrete measured a genuine five and a quarter inches at three test holes, which cleared the anchor spec with margin. Used was on the table until he priced a cable and lock rebuild on the orphan lift he found two counties over, at which point new won on paperwork alone.

He ended up with a new 10,000 lb baseplate unit, installed it himself with a borrowed skid loader, and called us in the fall to order a set of low-profile pad adapters for the race car. That is a completely normal outcome, and it took one phone call and a tape measure to get there. If you are somewhere in the middle of the same tree — narrowing down automotive two post lifts and stuck on a variable you can’t resolve — call us at 800-674-9302. We would rather talk you out of the wrong lift than sell you the wrong lift, and we stock parts for every major brand so we are not fishing for a single-model commission. See also our overview of asymmetric vs symmetric two post lifts if arm configuration is still an open question.