Used vs New Two Post Lifts: A Quad Cities Collector’s First Year

Most of the shoppers who call us about automotive two post lifts are not shops at all — they are collectors with four or five cars, a decent slab, and a growing frustration with jack stands. That was exactly the situation with a collector near the Quad Cities who reached out to us a couple of springs ago. He had a 1969 muscle car, a couple of daily drivers, a project truck that never seemed to move, and a stack of brake rotors in the corner of the garage he had been meaning to install for eight months. He wanted to know one thing above everything else: should he buy used or buy new? We spent about forty minutes on the phone that first call, and what follows is how his first year of ownership actually went.

The Phone Call That Started It: Used or New?

He opened with the same line we hear weekly. “I found a used one on marketplace for about a third of what you quoted me. Talk me out of it.” We do not talk anybody out of used equipment on principle. There is genuinely good used gear out there, and we have installed plenty of it. What we did instead was walk him through what he could actually verify about that particular unit. Did the seller have the model and serial? Could he pull the data plate photo? Were the original arms all present, or had somebody mixed arms from a different series? Were the lifting cables and the equalization cables the correct length and free of broken strands and kinks? Did the columns show any evidence of having been anchored, unanchored, and re-anchored two or three times?

He could answer roughly none of those questions, which is normal. The seller was a estate situation, and nobody left knew anything about the equipment. That is the real cost of buying used — not the purchase price, but the diagnostic time and the parts you buy to bring an unknown unit back to a known state. We told him what we tell everyone: budget the used purchase price plus a realistic parts allowance for cables, slider blocks, and arm pins. If that total still beats new by a wide margin and the model has parts support, buy it. If it lands within twenty percent of a new unit with a warranty, buy new. He did the arithmetic and decided on new.

Why the Slab Decided More Than the Budget Did

Before we talked models, we talked concrete. His garage was a 1990s attached three-stall with a slab of unknown thickness. He thought it was four inches. We asked him to core-drill a test hole in an inconspicuous corner or, at minimum, drill with a masonry bit and measure where he broke through. It came back at just under five inches with no visible reinforcement, poured on what looked like decent compacted fill. That is right at the edge for a lot of the mid-capacity units, and it is the single most common thing that changes the conversation about automotive two post lifts.

The options at that point were simple: pour a reinforced pad section under each column footprint, or step down to a unit whose anchor loading the existing slab could carry. He chose to cut and pour two pads — roughly four feet square, eight inches thick, tied into the existing slab with rebar dowels. A local concrete outfit did it in a morning for less than the price of a set of new cables, and it bought him headroom for the next thirty years. We have watched people skip this step and then live with a lift they never fully trust. Trust is the whole point of the equipment. A collector who is nervous about his columns will still crawl under the car on jack stands, and then the lift becomes a very expensive coat rack. Concrete first, always.

Choosing the Column Configuration for a Garage Full of Cars

His fleet ran from a low-slung sports car to a three-quarter-ton pickup, and the garage had a nine-foot ceiling with a sectional door and a torsion tube crossing right where an overhead beam would want to live. That combination points hard toward a baseplate configuration rather than an overhead. Baseplate units run the hydraulic line and the equalization cable through a low channel at floor level, which means you keep every inch of vertical clearance and you can raise a tall vehicle until the roof nearly touches the ceiling. The tradeoff is that you drive over the floor plate, and if you sweep a lot of gravel into the garage it needs occasional attention.

We also steered him to an asymmetric arm setup. Asymmetric columns are rotated slightly and paired with a short front arm and a long rear arm, which puts the car further back between the posts and lets the doors swing open past the column. For somebody who is getting in and out of a collector car to move it, check a pedal, or pull an interior panel, that door clearance matters more than any spec sheet number. Symmetric layouts still make sense for shops running a lot of long-wheelbase trucks and vans, and we sell plenty of them, but for a mixed collection in a residential garage, asymmetric is usually the right call. If you are weighing the same decision, our guide to choosing a two post lift breaks the arm geometry down further.

Install Day in the Quad Cities

Install went on a Tuesday in April. Two of our techs drove over from Ames with the columns, the carriage assemblies, the power unit, and a box of anchors. The whole job took about five hours, and most of that was layout and anchoring rather than assembly. Our crew snapped chalk lines, verified the column spacing against the vehicle he most wanted to lift, drilled the anchor holes, vacuumed them out properly — which people skip and then wonder why anchors do not hold torque — set the anchors, and torqued them to spec.

Then came the part he did not expect to care about: shimming. Almost no garage floor is dead level, and getting the columns plumb requires shims under the base plates. Our techs used a four-foot level on two faces of each column and worked the shims until both were plumb within tolerance. A column that leans even slightly will wear the slider blocks unevenly and put the carriage out of square over time. After that it was routing the hydraulic hose and equalization cable through the floor channel, filling and bleeding the power unit, and cycling the lift empty a dozen times to confirm both carriages arrived at the locks together. We put his own truck on it, ran it to full height, dropped it onto the locks, and had him listen to the sound the pawls make so he would know later what right sounds like. That five-minute lesson prevents more service calls than anything else we do.

The First Real Job: Brakes and Rotors on the Project Car

Two weekends after install, he finally did the brake job that had been waiting in the corner all winter. He texted us photos, which is the highest compliment a customer can pay. The car went up to about chest height, both front wheels came off in under ten minutes, and the caliper brackets and rotors came off without a single knuckle-busting reach over a fender. He said the thing that surprised him was the light — with the car overhead and a shop light hung from the arm, he could actually see the caliper slide pins he had been guessing at for years.

Brake work is the use case that sells more of these units than any other. Rotor swaps, caliper rebuilds, bleeding a full system by yourself with the pedal in reach — all of it is transformed by having the car at working height with unobstructed access to all four corners. A pair of automotive two post lifts in a two-tech shop will do more brake jobs in a day than four techs on the floor, and even in a one-man garage the time savings compound fast. He told us the brake job that would have eaten a full Saturday took him about ninety minutes including a coffee break. That is the math that makes people stop asking about the purchase price and start asking why they waited so long.

What the First Year Actually Cost Him

Here is the honest ledger, in ranges, because equipment pricing moves. The lift itself landed in the mid four figures for a quality 10,000 lb unit. Installation with anchoring and shimming ran a low four-figure add. The two concrete pads were a few hundred dollars. A dedicated 220V circuit run by an electrician was another few hundred. Add a set of truck adapters and a couple of rubber pads and he was into the project for a total that surprised nobody who had done the homework.

Year-one maintenance was almost nothing, which is typical. He greased the slider block channels twice, checked the equalization cable tension once at about the six-month mark, topped the hydraulic reservoir a quarter inch after initial bleed-down, and blew the floor channel out with compressed air a few times. Total consumable spend was less than a set of tires. That is the part of the ownership story that gets lost in the used-versus-new argument — well-installed automotive two post lifts are astonishingly cheap to keep running. The expensive scenarios are the ones where cables were already fatigued at purchase, where anchors were set in thin concrete, or where nobody ever checked the locks. None of those are inevitable. They are all decisions made at purchase and install. See our notes on annual lift maintenance for the full routine.

What We’d Tell the Next Collector Asking About Automotive Two Post Lifts

Start with the ceiling, the slab, and the widest vehicle you own — in that order. Those three numbers eliminate most of the catalog before you ever look at a price. Then decide honestly whether you are a person who enjoys diagnosing and rebuilding used machinery. If you are, a used unit with a verifiable model number and available parts is a legitimate value play, and we will happily supply the cables, arm pins, and slider blocks to bring it back. If you would rather spend your Saturdays under a car than under a lift, buy new, get it installed by people who do it weekly, and forget about it.

The one thing we push back on hardest is buying on capacity alone. People fixate on the 10,000 versus 12,000 lb question when the real differentiators for a collector are arm reach, door clearance, lock spacing, and column height relative to their ceiling. We have seen a beautifully specified 9,000 lb unit serve a five-car collection perfectly for a decade, and we have seen an oversized unit sit unused because the arms would not reach the pinch welds on the owner’s favorite car. If you are in the Quad Cities, central Iowa, or anywhere within our service radius and you want a straight answer about automotive two post lifts, call us at 800-674-9302. We would rather size it right the first time than sell you something twice. Our ceiling height guide is a good place to start before you call.