Every spring and fall we field the same phone call from mobile mechanics and hobbyists around West Des Moines: they want one of the automotive two post lifts they’ve seen in a friend’s shop, they want to store a project car on it over the winter, and they have no idea whether to buy an overhead model or a baseplate model. It is a fair question, because the answer depends almost entirely on the building — ceiling height, door header, concrete thickness, and where the electrical service happens to sit. We install this equipment across Iowa every week, so instead of giving you a generic spec sheet comparison, we’re going to walk you through a real install we finished on the west side of the metro and explain exactly why the configuration decision went the way it did.
Overhead and baseplate models from Rotary, Challenger, BendPak, and Atlas — 9,000 lb through 18,000 lb capacity. Not sure which fits your building? Call us with your ceiling height and door dimensions and we’ll spec it for you.
The West Des Moines Job: A 30×40 Pole Building and One Very Specific Ceiling
The customer was a mobile mechanic who had been working out of a van for six years and finally built a shop behind his house. Thirty by forty feet, concrete floor poured the previous summer, twelve-foot sidewalls. He wanted to keep doing brake jobs and suspension work for his regular customers, but the real motivation was storage: he had a convertible that spent five months a year taking up half the garage, and he wanted it parked in the air from November through April with a daily driver underneath.
Twelve-foot sidewalls sound generous until you actually measure. The trusses on that building dropped down and the actual clear height under the bottom chord was closer to eleven feet six inches at the low point, and the garage door opener rail ran right through the middle of the bay he wanted to use. An overhead model needs the crossbar and its shutoff bar to clear the tallest vehicle you plan to raise, plus the lift’s own structure above that. We measured, did the math on his convertible with the top up, and it was going to be tight enough that he’d be ducking every time he walked under the beam. That’s the kind of detail that decides these jobs, and it’s why we don’t quote automotive two post lifts over email without dimensions.
Why We Went Baseplate on This One
A baseplate design routes the equalization cables and hydraulic hose through a low steel channel bolted to the floor between the two columns instead of through an overhead crossbeam. You give up a clean drive-through — you’re stepping over a ramp roughly two to three inches tall — but you gain every inch of vertical space in the building. On this job that was the whole ballgame. With a baseplate model the only thing above the vehicle was air, so he could raise the convertible to full height and still walk under it without stooping, and the garage door rail was a non-issue.
There’s a second reason baseplate made sense here, and it’s one people don’t think about. Overhead models put the shutoff bar in a fixed position, which means anything taller than that bar simply can’t go up. This mechanic occasionally works on a lifted pickup for a neighbor. With the baseplate configuration there’s no ceiling on vehicle height other than the building itself. The tradeoffs are real — that floor channel collects dirt, and you will kick it with a floor jack eventually — but for a single-bay shop where storage is a primary use case, we recommend baseplate more often than not. We told him plainly that if he’d built with fourteen-foot walls we would have steered him the other direction.
Concrete: The Part Nobody Wants to Hear About
We ask about concrete before we ask about anything else. A two post design puts enormous point loads into the floor through the column anchors — you’re taking the entire weight of a vehicle, plus dynamic load, and transferring it into eight or ten anchor bolts per column. Most manufacturers specify a minimum of four inches of 3,000 PSI concrete for a 10,000 lb unit, and many want more for higher capacities. Four inches is a floor, not a target.
On this West Des Moines job the slab was a year old and the customer had watched it get poured, which is the best case scenario. He knew it was five inches with fiber mesh. We still drilled a test hole and confirmed before we set anchors, because we’ve been on jobs where the homeowner swore the pour was five inches and the bit dropped through at three and a half over a gravel void. When that happens the fix is cutting out a section and pouring a proper footing pad — usually a four-by-four-foot square at each column, a foot deep, tied into the existing slab. It adds a week and some cost, but it’s not optional. We’ve been called out to inspect automotive two post lifts that were anchored into thin slabs and started tipping under load, and there is no cheap version of that conversation. If you’re pouring new concrete and know a lift is coming, tell your concrete contractor and thicken those areas now.
Setting Up Automotive Two Post Lifts for Long-Term Vehicle Storage
Storing a car in the air for five months is a different duty cycle than raising and lowering one forty times a day, and it changes how we set the equipment up. First, the vehicle sits on the mechanical safety locks, not on hydraulic pressure. Every reputable design has locks in the columns at fixed intervals, and the correct procedure is to raise past the lock you want, then lower until both sides audibly seat. The hydraulic system holds nothing overnight. If you come back in three weeks and the arms have crept down an inch, your cylinder is bypassing internally and needs attention — but the car never moved, because the locks caught it.
Second, we set the arms wide and low on the pinch welds or frame points and we mark them. On a stored car, tire pressure drops over the winter and the vehicle settles slightly on its suspension. We’ve seen adapter pads walk out of position on cars that sat all season because they were placed on a marginal contact point to begin with. Take the extra five minutes on day one. Third, plan your clearance underneath honestly — the daily driver going below needs to fit with the doors open, not just fit. On this install we chalked the floor so he knew exactly where to park. Small thing, but it’s the difference between a usable storage bay and a bay you resent.
Asymmetric, Symmetric, and Why Arm Geometry Matters More Than Capacity
Most buyers fixate on capacity and ignore arm configuration, which is backwards. A symmetric design places the columns directly across from each other and puts the vehicle centered between them, front-to-back weight split roughly fifty-fifty. That works beautifully for trucks and vans with long wheelbases and evenly distributed weight. The problem is door swing: in a symmetric setup on a passenger car, the columns land near the doors and you’re squeezing to get in.
Asymmetric designs rotate the columns roughly thirty degrees and use unequal-length arms, which shifts the vehicle rearward so the driver’s door opens past the column. For a shop doing mostly cars and light SUVs, that’s the right call, and it’s what we put in this West Des Moines building. There are also versatile designs marketed as handling both — Rotary and Challenger both build models with adjustable or dual-purpose arm sets — and those are legitimately good if your vehicle mix swings from a Miata to a three-quarter-ton pickup in the same afternoon. What matters is being honest about what you actually lift. We had a tire shop in the Ames area order symmetric units because a forum post said they were stronger, then spend two years crawling into cars sideways. Arm geometry on automotive two post lifts is a daily-comfort issue and a safety issue, since fighting to reach a lift point is how pads get set wrong.
Power, Air, and the Details That Get Forgotten Until Install Day
The single most common delay we run into isn’t concrete and isn’t ceiling height — it’s electrical. Most residential and light-commercial units in this class run a 220V single-phase motor and want a dedicated 30-amp circuit within reach of the power unit column. Homeowners routinely assume the 110V outlet by the workbench will do. It won’t run the pump, and an undersized extension cord will cook a motor. We tell people to have the electrician run the circuit before we show up, and to put it on the column side where the power unit will actually live, which is a decision you make when you lay out the bay.
Air matters too. Nearly every design in this category uses a pneumatic lock release — a small air cylinder pulls the safety latches so you can lower. No air, no lowering, and you’ll be pulling latches by hand with a screwdriver, which is miserable. A small compressor is enough; you’re moving very little volume. Beyond that: leave room behind the columns for the power unit door to open, plan where the hoses cross the bay, and think about lighting, because the underside of a car is dark and a shop light clamped to an arm gets in the way of everything. These are the details we walk through on every quote, and they’re the reason our installs finish in a day instead of dragging out over three visits.
What This Install Cost Him, and What Yours Might
We don’t publish hard prices because the number moves with freight, capacity, and how much prep the building needs, but we can give you honest tiers. A quality baseplate or overhead unit in the 9,000 to 10,000 lb range from a reputable manufacturer lands in the low-to-mid four figures for the equipment itself. Step up to 12,000 or 15,000 lb capacity with heavier columns and you’re into the mid-to-upper four figures and sometimes past that. Professional installation in central Iowa typically runs several hundred to around a thousand dollars depending on drive time, anchor count, and whether we’re coring for a footing pad.
The West Des Moines job came in near the middle of that spread. He bought a 10,000 lb baseplate unit, we handled install and certification, and his total was well under what he’d budgeted because his concrete cooperated. That’s the variable. If you want a realistic number, the fastest path is to send us ceiling height at the lowest point, door header height, slab thickness and age, and the heaviest vehicle you plan to raise. We’ll tell you which of the automotive two post lifts we stock actually fit and which ones we’d talk you out of. If you’re weighing this against a four-post for storage, read our comparison of 4-post versus 2-post lifts for home garages, and if concrete is your worry, our guide to car lift concrete requirements covers the testing process in detail. When it’s time for maintenance, our notes on two-post lift cable inspection will keep the unit safe for the next twenty years.
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