A two post annual inspection is the single most important thing standing between your shop and a lift failure that puts someone in the hospital. We’re Auto Lift Services, based in Ames, and we perform these inspections on two post lifts all over Iowa — from single-bay home garages to twenty-bay dealership service departments. Lifts don’t fail because owners are careless. They fail because a worn arm restrictor, a cracked weld, or a hydraulic hose nobody looked at for three years finally gives out at the worst possible moment. An annual inspection catches those problems while they’re still cheap and boring to fix.
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What a Two Post Annual Inspection Actually Covers
A proper two post annual inspection isn’t a five-minute walkaround. We follow the ANSI/ALI ALOIM standard, which means checking the structural columns for cracks, bent components, or loose anchor bolts, then moving to the carriage and arms. We look for worn pins, cracked or bent arm restrictor pawls, and any arm that has developed excess play at the pivot. Overhead and equalization cables get pulled and inspected strand by strand for fraying, kinking, or corrosion, and safety locks get cycled to confirm they engage cleanly on every rung.
From there we move into the hydraulic system: hoses, fittings, the power unit, and the cylinder itself. Leaks, weeping seals, and low fluid all get flagged. We also check the electrical side — control switches, limit switches, and safety interlocks that are supposed to stop the lift if something’s wrong. Finally we verify the lift is anchored correctly for the concrete it’s sitting on, since a two post annual inspection means nothing if the slab underneath was never rated for the load. Every one of these items goes on a written report with pass, fail, or monitor status, so shop owners have documentation, not just a verbal thumbs-up.
Why Skipping It Costs More Than the Inspection Itself
We understand the temptation. A lift that’s lifting cars every day looks fine. But a two post annual inspection exists because the failure points aren’t visible from the driver’s seat. A cable that’s 80% frayed still holds a car right up until it doesn’t. An arm restrictor pawl worn past spec still clicks into place — it just won’t hold under load the way it’s designed to. These aren’t hypothetical scenarios; they’re the exact findings we run into on inspections across Iowa every month.
There’s also the liability side. If a technician gets hurt on an uninspected lift, insurance carriers and OSHA both ask for inspection records. No records, and the shop owner is exposed in a way that dwarfs the cost of the inspection itself. Many insurance policies for shops now explicitly reference lift inspection compliance. A two post annual inspection is cheap insurance against a lawsuit, a shutdown, or worse. We’ve had shop owners tell us they wish they’d started annual inspections years earlier, after finding a cracked weld or a badly worn cylinder rod they never would have caught on their own.
Who Should Perform Your Inspection
Technically, anyone trained to ANSI/ALI ALOIM standards can perform a two post annual inspection, but in practice most shop owners don’t have the time or the specialized knowledge to do it thoroughly and objectively. It’s easy to look at your own equipment and assume it’s fine because it’s always been fine. A third-party inspector has no stake in that assumption — we’re there to find problems, not to confirm what you already believe.
We recommend working with an inspector who actually installs and services lifts day to day, not someone who only does paperwork inspections. Understanding how a Rotary or Challenger two post lift is built, and what normal wear looks like on that specific model, changes how thorough and how fast the inspection can be. Our team at Auto Lift Services performs two post annual inspection visits throughout Iowa, and because we also stock parts and do repairs, if we find something wrong, we can usually fix it on the same visit instead of leaving your bay down for a week waiting on a part.
How Often You Really Need One
The name says it — annual. Once a year, every two post lift in commercial use needs a full inspection under the ALOIM standard, regardless of how light or heavy the usage has been. High-volume shops running a lift ten or more times a day sometimes benefit from a mid-year check as well, especially on cables and hydraulic seals that wear faster under constant cycling. A two post annual inspection scheduled at the same time each year also makes it easy to build a maintenance history you can hand off if you ever sell the shop or the lift.
Home garage lifts get more leeway, but we still tell owners to have a professional look at the lift annually if it sees regular use, and at minimum before resuming heavy use after months of sitting idle. Cables and seals degrade with age, not just with cycles, so a lift that sat all winter still needs eyes on it before spring.
What Happens If Your Lift Fails Inspection
Failing a two post annual inspection isn’t the end of the world — it’s the point. We tag the lift out of service for the specific failed item, document it, and give you options. Sometimes it’s a straightforward part swap: a cable, a set of arm pins, a hydraulic hose. Sometimes it’s more involved, like a cylinder rebuild or replacing a worn power unit. We carry parts for Rotary, Challenger, BendPak, and Atlas lifts, so most failures get resolved fast rather than turning into weeks of downtime.
Occasionally an inspection reveals a lift that’s simply past its economical service life — old enough that the cost of repeated repairs outweighs the cost of replacing it. We’ll tell you honestly when that’s the case instead of stringing along repairs on equipment that’s fighting you every year. For more detail on the exact checklist items we go through, see our two post lift annual inspection checklist, and if you’re looking at ALI-specific certification requirements, our ALI inspection standards article covers that in more depth.
Scheduling Across Iowa Shops
We run inspection routes across the state, which means we can often bundle a two post annual inspection with a visit to a neighboring shop and keep travel costs reasonable. Whether you’re in Ames, Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, or a smaller town without a local lift specialist, we’ve likely already got a route nearby. Shops that get on our annual schedule tend to find it far easier to stay compliant, since we call ahead every year instead of leaving it to the owner to remember.
We also work with dealerships and fleet shops that have multiple lifts on site, coordinating inspections so the whole facility gets certified in one visit instead of piecemeal over months. If you’ve never had a two post annual inspection done, or it’s been longer than a year, give us a call and we’ll get you on the calendar. For a broader look at the process itself, our two post lift annual inspection in Iowa guide walks through what to expect on the day of your visit.
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