A Pre-Purchase Checklist for Automotive Two Post Lifts on Central Iowa Farm Shops

The call that prompted this article came from a farm shop about forty minutes north of Ames. The owner had been dropping oil pans on the ground on a creeper for twenty years, finally decided he was done doing it that way, and wanted to know which model to buy. He had a 40×60 machine shed, a slab of unknown thickness, and a stack of printed model numbers from three different websites that he couldn’t tell apart. That’s a completely normal starting point. Automotive two post lifts look interchangeable in a catalog photo, and the spec sheets are written by marketing departments. So we built him a checklist, walked it with him over the phone, and he ordered the right unit the same week. Here’s that checklist.

Step One: Measure Your Ceiling Before You Look at Anything

Every wasted week we’ve watched a customer spend started with skipping this. Measure from the finished floor to the lowest obstruction in the bay — not the peak of the truss, the lowest thing. That’s usually a light fixture, a heater, a garage door track, a sprinkler head, or the bottom chord of the truss itself. Write that number down. Then measure your garage door opening height separately, because on a lot of central Iowa machine sheds the door header is lower than the ceiling and it determines what you can drive in.

A typical overhead-style two-post column needs somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 feet of clearance, give or take by model. Some are shorter. If your lowest obstruction is under about 11 and a half feet, you’re looking at a baseplate configuration, where the crossover hose and equalization run through a plate on the floor instead of across the top. We had a shop up in North Dakota with a hard 139-inch max height who ended up in exactly that situation. Baseplate works fine — it’s a proven design and thousands of shops run it — but you lose the clean drive-through and you have a bar on the floor to step over. Know which camp you’re in before you shop, because half the model numbers out there won’t fit your building and it saves a lot of time to eliminate them on day one.

Step Two: Verify the Concrete, Not the Concrete You Think You Have

Farm shop slabs are the wild west. We’ve cored floors that the owner swore were six inches and found four and a half with no rebar. One customer in northern Missouri told us his was “about five inches, but may be less” — which is the most honest answer we’ve ever gotten and also exactly the problem.

Manufacturers publish minimum concrete requirements for a reason, and it’s typically in the range of four to six inches of 3,000 PSI or better, cured, with specified anchor embedment and edge distance. Those numbers aren’t padding. The anchors are what keep the columns vertical under an off-center load, and pull-out failure is how vehicles come off automotive two post lifts. Checking is not hard: drill a small test hole in an inconspicuous spot, or better, let us do it during a site visit. If the slab comes up short, the fix is to saw-cut and pour proper pads under each column footprint — typically a few feet square and a foot deep, tied in with dowels. That’s a day of work and a modest cost, and it is not optional. We will decline an installation on inadequate concrete, and any installer worth hiring will do the same. Also check for radiant heat tubing before anyone drills. Several customers have mentioned floor heat when we asked, and one had it and didn’t know. An infrared camera on a cold morning finds it fast.

Step Three: Pick Capacity Based on Reality, Not Ego

The farm shop owner we mentioned had a three-quarter ton pickup, a pair of sedans, and a small tractor loader he sometimes wanted off the ground. His heaviest realistic load was around 8,000 pounds. He was shopping 15,000 lb units because bigger sounded safer.

Here’s how capacity actually works. A 10,000 lb rating covers essentially every light-duty pickup, SUV, and car on Iowa roads with margin to spare. Ten thousand pounds is the volume seller for a reason and it’s where the widest model selection, the best parts availability, and the best pricing live. You step up to 12,000 or 15,000 when you’re regularly lifting one-ton duallies, box trucks, or loaded work vehicles — and when you do, you also need more ceiling, more concrete, wider columns, and a bigger power unit. Going bigger than you need costs money in every one of those categories. One caution the other direction: the light-capacity units in the 6,000 to 7,000 lb range that show up cheap online are sized for passenger cars only, and a modern half-ton crew cab can flirt with that number before you add a toolbox and a full tank. If there’s any chance a real pickup goes on it, buy 10,000. That’s the honest answer for probably eighty percent of the farm and home shops we quote.

Step Four: Decode the Model Numbers and Compare Real Specs

This is where people get lost. A model designation like SPO12 or CL10 or 9LC or 10AP tells you something once you know the pattern, but across brands the patterns don’t match. Rather than memorize codes, pull the actual spec sheet for each candidate and compare six numbers side by side on a piece of paper.

Those six: rated capacity, overall height, minimum ceiling required, maximum lifting height at the pad, distance between columns, and minimum pad height with the arms fully lowered. That last one matters more than most buyers realize — if you work on anything low, a tall pad is a problem, and low-profile arms exist specifically to solve it. A shop owner in California called us wanting low-profile arms because he does a lot of oil service on cars that sit close to the ground. Also compare arm configuration: symmetric columns face each other squarely and center the vehicle between them, asymmetric columns are rotated so you can open the doors, and three-stage front arms let you reach the pinch welds on short-wheelbase cars. For oil pan gasket work specifically — which is what our farm shop customer was after — you want good clearance around the frame rails and arms that swing out of the way of the pan, so asymmetric with three-stage front arms is usually the pick. Our overview of symmetric versus asymmetric designs walks through the tradeoffs in more detail.

Step Five: Confirm Power and Air Before Delivery

We’ve shown up to installs where everything checked out except that nobody thought about electrical, and the customer had to wait two weeks on an electrician while a crated lift sat in the shed. Add this to your checklist and it never happens.

Most residential and light-commercial power units run 220V single phase and draw enough that they want their own circuit — check the manufacturer’s amperage spec and have a dedicated receptacle within reach of the power unit’s cord, on the correct column side. Larger commercial units may be three phase, which most farm shops don’t have. Some models offer 110V options at reduced lift speed, and they work, but the pump cycles longer and you’ll notice it every day. Second item: the arm restraints and safety locks on most automotive two post lifts are mechanical and don’t need air, but some designs use an air-actuated lock release. If yours does, you need a compressor line at the lift. Third: know where the crate is going to land. These ship on a semi, the columns are heavy, and unless the freight carrier has a liftgate you need a forklift or a skid loader with forks. Plenty of farm shops have that. If you don’t, tell us up front and we’ll arrange the delivery accordingly rather than discovering it at the end of the driveway.

Step Six: Decide Install Yourself or Hire It Out

Some buyers explicitly don’t want installation — we get those leads regularly, and there’s nothing wrong with a mechanically capable owner setting up his own equipment. A two-post install is not exotic work: layout, drill, anchor, plumb the columns, run hydraulic lines, bleed the system, set the locks, test cycle, torque check.

What it does require is a rotary hammer with the right bit, a good level, the ability to lift a several-hundred-pound column upright safely, a torque wrench that reaches the anchor spec, and the discipline to follow the manual exactly instead of eyeballing it. The steps people skip are the ones that matter: verifying the columns are plumb in both planes after loading, re-torquing anchors after the first few cycles, and properly bleeding the hydraulic circuit so the arms don’t drift. When we get called out to fix a self-install, it’s almost always one of those three. If you’re going to do it yourself, buy from someone who will answer the phone during the install — we do that for our customers whether they bought installation or not. If you’d rather hire it, we install across central Iowa and well beyond, and the documented install record is worth something later if you ever sell. Either way, get an inspection before the first vehicle goes up. See our two-post installation guide for the full sequence.

The Full Checklist, One More Time

Print this or write it on the back of an envelope. Lowest ceiling obstruction, measured. Door opening height, measured. Slab thickness and PSI, verified rather than assumed. Radiant heat, checked for. Heaviest vehicle you’ll actually lift, honestly. Capacity selected — 10,000 lb unless you have a documented reason. Overhead or baseplate, determined by your ceiling number. Symmetric or asymmetric, determined by your vehicle mix and door swing. Low-profile or three-stage arms, if you work on cars that sit low. Electrical service confirmed and a dedicated circuit run. Unloading equipment on site. Install plan settled. Brand with a real parts network behind it.

Work that list and you will not make a bad purchase. Skip items on it and you’ll find out which one you skipped at the worst possible moment. We keep every one of those questions on the intake sheet when somebody calls us about automotive two post lifts, because the twenty minutes it takes to answer them saves weeks of back-and-forth and a fair number of returned crates. Our farm shop customer went from a stack of confusing model numbers to a single asymmetric 10,000 lb unit that fit his shed, cleared his door, sat on a poured pad we cut in, and now lets him pull an oil pan standing up. That’s the whole point. If you want us to walk the checklist with you on your building, call 800-674-9302 or look through our store and send us the models you’re weighing. We’ll tell you which one fits.