A Pre-Purchase Checklist for Automotive Two Post Lifts in a Home Shop

A weekend hobbyist in southern Minnesota emailed us in the middle of framing a new 30×40 pole building, asking which of the automotive two post lifts we carry would let him do his own alignment work and camber adjustments on a couple of project cars. He had 12-foot sidewalls, a slab already poured, and a builder who had not been told a lift was going in. That last detail is the one that costs people money. Lift selection is not a decision you make after the building is done — it’s a decision that should drive several choices during the build. This is the checklist we walk hobbyists through, in the order the questions actually matter, so you don’t end up retrofitting around a machine you could have planned for.

Step One: Decide What You’re Actually Doing Under the Car

Before you look at a single model, write down the three or four jobs you expect to do most. For our southern Minnesota builder, it was alignment adjustments, exhaust work, and general maintenance on two older sports cars plus a daily driver. That list points hard toward a two post rather than a four post, because alignment and suspension work both want the wheels hanging free. A four post is a storage and service platform; a two post gives you wheels-free access, which is the entire point when you’re setting camber plates or dropping a subframe.

Be careful with the alignment piece specifically, though. A two post will let you access the adjusters and turn the wrenches, but it will not, by itself, give you a reference plane for measuring alignment. Proper alignment on a two post means either doing your setup on the floor with plates and strings and then lifting only to make adjustments, or accepting that you’re doing an approximate job. Serious alignment work lives on a four post with slip plates and turntables or on a scissor alignment rack. Plenty of hobbyists do excellent string alignments by lifting to adjust and lowering to measure, and that’s a perfectly reasonable workflow — just go in knowing that’s what you’re signing up for. We’d rather tell you that now than have you disappointed after the concrete cures.

Step Two: Measure Ceiling Height Before the Trusses Go Up

Twelve-foot sidewalls sound generous until you account for what hangs below them. Trusses, purlins, lights, garage door tracks, opener rails, and any ductwork all live in that space. Most overhead-style automotive two post lifts want twelve to fourteen feet of genuinely clear height, measured to the lowest thing in the way anywhere in the lift footprint. A 12-foot wall with a truss bottom chord at 11 feet 2 inches is an 11-foot-2 building as far as the lift is concerned.

If you’re still in the framing stage, this is where you win. Ask your builder to run scissor trusses or raise the heel height over the lift bay, relocate the door opener to a jackshaft mount on the wall instead of a center rail, and keep lighting and any electrical runs out of a 12-by-14-foot rectangle centered on where the lift will go. All of that is cheap while the building is open and expensive afterward. If the building is already done and you’re short on height, a baseplate configuration solves it — the crossmember goes on the floor instead of overhead, and you can typically get away with ten or eleven feet. You trade a clear floor for a low steel channel between the columns, which most home shops adapt to fine. Our article on ceiling height requirements breaks the numbers down further.

Step Three: Verify the Slab, Even If It’s New

New concrete is not automatically adequate concrete. A typical pole building slab gets poured at four inches with fiber mesh and no rebar, and while four inches of 3,000 PSI is the published minimum for many 9,000 and 10,000 lb models, it’s the bare minimum. Higher-capacity units often want five or six. And the published spec assumes a full 28-day cure, uniform thickness, and solid compacted base underneath — not a soft spot where the plumber trenched.

If your slab isn’t poured yet, this is the single easiest thing to get right: tell your concrete contractor where the columns are going and have him thicken those two areas to six inches with rebar mat. It adds almost nothing to the pour cost. If the slab is already down, core drill at the column locations to confirm thickness before you order anything. We’ve had homeowners discover four inches of concrete over six inches of loose fill, which is a footing job, not a lift job. Cutting and pouring two footing pads is a weekend of work and a modest bill. Anchoring into inadequate concrete is how a column pulls loose, and with automotive two post lifts there is no partial failure mode that ends well. Also check for radiant heat tubing — a growing number of Minnesota and Iowa shops have PEX in the slab, and drilling an anchor into a heat loop is a very bad afternoon. Get the as-built drawing or scan it.

Step Four: Get the Electrical Right the First Time

Most home-shop two post units run a 220V single-phase motor drawing roughly 20 to 25 amps under load, though some smaller models offer 110V configurations. Pulling a dedicated 220V circuit while the walls are open is trivial. Pulling it afterward through finished steel siding and insulation is not. Put the receptacle within a few feet of where the power-side column will stand, and confirm which side that is before you rough in — the power unit mounts on one column, and swapping sides after the fact means either relocating the power unit or running conduit across the bay.

While you’re planning electrical, plan lighting too. The single most common complaint we hear from home-shop owners a year after install is that their lighting is now useless, because a vehicle at six feet blocks every overhead fixture in the building. Run LED strips along the side walls at about seven feet, aimed inward, in addition to whatever you have overhead. Add a couple of receptacles on the columns themselves or on the nearest wall at working height so you’re not running extension cords under the lift. And if you plan to add air tools, drop your compressor line to a reel positioned between the columns rather than at one end. None of this is expensive during the build. All of it is a project later.

Step Five: Match Capacity and Arms to Your Vehicles

The email we got said “probably 7,000 pounds or less” for the heaviest vehicle, which is a common estimate and usually a low one. People forget that a modern half-ton crew cab with a topper is pushing 6,000, a three-quarter-ton diesel is well past 8,000, and an EV crossover can surprise you badly — battery packs add 1,000 to 1,500 pounds over an equivalent gas vehicle. Our default recommendation for a home shop is 10,000 lb, and we bump to 12,000 if there’s any truck in the future. The cost difference between capacity tiers on automotive two post lifts is modest compared to the cost of outgrowing your equipment in three years.

Arms matter as much as capacity for a hobbyist working on lower cars. Ask for three-stage telescoping low-profile front arms. They collapse short enough to slide under a lowered vehicle and extend long enough to reach the rear pickup points on a full-size truck, and they save you from stacking adapter pucks at awkward heights. Asymmetric column rotation lets you open doors without hitting steel, which matters if you’re getting in and out of the car repeatedly during an alignment session. Also budget for a set of tall truck adapters and a few extra rubber pads — pads are consumables and the factory set will be flat within a couple of years. We stock pads and adapters for essentially every brand still in the field.

Step Six: Plan the Install, Not Just the Purchase

Freight is the part nobody budgets for. A two post lift ships as two columns, a carriage set, arms, a power unit, and hardware, and it arrives on a pallet weighing 1,500 to 2,000 pounds on a semi that cannot back into most rural driveways. You need a forklift, a skid steer with forks, or a liftgate delivery arranged in advance. Several of the leads we work with have a forklift on the property, and that makes the day easy. If you don’t, tell us before we book freight and we’ll arrange it differently.

Then decide whether you’re installing it yourself. Plenty of capable people do — the manual is clear, the hardware is straightforward, and a two post is fundamentally two columns, an overhead or baseplate connection, cables, and hydraulics. Budget a full day with a helper and a rotary hammer. What we’d insist on either way is a professional inspection before first use: anchor torque verified, cables tensioned to spec, locks cycling on both columns, hydraulic system bled, and the lift cycled to full height empty and then with a known load. If you’d rather we handle the whole thing, we install throughout Iowa and into the surrounding states, and our crews do this every week. Either way, call 800-674-9302 before you order and let us look at your dimensions. We’ve talked a lot of people out of the wrong lift and it’s cheaper for everyone.