A First-Year Ownership Story: 2 Post Car Lift at a Cedar Falls RV Shop

An RV and trailer service shop in Cedar Falls installed their first 2 post car lift with us just over a year ago, and last month we finished a follow-up conversation with the owner about how the first twelve months actually went. RV and trailer work has some unusual demands – long wheelbases, mid-frame exhaust runs, driveline access on tandem-axle setups – and a 2-post lift is not always the obvious answer for that mix. But once we walked through the vehicles they actually service versus the ones they wished they serviced, the machine made sense. What follows is the honest first-year timeline, month by month, from freight logistics through the small maintenance surprise that showed up around month six.

The Bay Was Ready, the Truck Wasn’t

The Cedar Falls shop had a bay ready long before the 2 post car lift arrived. Six inches of concrete poured for exactly this purpose, 14 feet of ceiling, three-phase 208-volt service at the wall, and a 12-foot overhead door with an approach flat enough to roll a lowered truck through without a scrape. Everything the checklist wanted, checked. The one thing they did not have was a forklift on site. They were an RV service outfit, not a heavy-equipment yard, and their heaviest lifting rig was a manual pallet jack.

We built the freight around that reality. The lift shipped from Iowa on a liftgate-equipped common carrier, which meant the driver would lower the pallet to the ground with a hydraulic gate at the back of the trailer. Liftgate freight adds cost and requires the delivery area to be firm enough for the truck to park on. The Cedar Falls shop had a concrete apron that met both requirements. If your shop is on gravel or muddy after a rain, we sometimes recommend renting a small forklift for the day instead – it comes out cheaper than the liftgate surcharge on repeat business.

Freight Booking and What LTL Actually Means

Freight for a 2 post car lift almost always ships less-than-truckload, or LTL. Your pallet shares trailer space with other freight, transfers at regional terminals, and moves on a delivery route with other stops. A pallet from central Iowa to Cedar Falls sounds like a three-hour drive on a map, and it is, but the LTL path routes through Des Moines or Cedar Rapids terminals with an overnight hold at each. Delivery window is typically three to five business days from pickup, not next-day.

We tell every client to plan the freight arrival at least a week before they want to install, in case a terminal delay pushes the delivery. Our Cedar Falls shop had a five-day window, and the pallet arrived on day four, which was normal. The driver called ahead about 45 minutes out – standard for LTL – and confirmed the liftgate delivery. The owner cleared his loading zone, marked where he wanted the pallet, and the whole handoff took under 20 minutes. LTL is not fast, but it is predictable if you plan around the window rather than the calendar day.

Unloading With a Forklift You Don’t Own

Even with a liftgate delivery, moving a 2 post car lift pallet from the delivery spot into the bay is not a one-person job. The crated components weigh close to 2,000 lbs together, and the columns are top-heavy and awkward. Our Cedar Falls owner rented a small warehouse forklift from a local rental yard for the afternoon and had it on site an hour before the truck. That let him move the pallet from the loading zone into the bay, position it near the intended install spot, and cut the crate open with our install crew present the next morning.

If you cannot rent a forklift locally, we have occasionally coordinated with a nearby shop or a neighbor to borrow one for a couple of hours. A grain-yard forklift, a construction pallet mover, or a rental yard reach truck all work fine. What does not work is trying to drag a pallet with straps and a floor jack. We have seen shops damage lift components during improvised unloads, and once a column takes a fall it is not going back on the truck. Rent the forklift. It is cheap insurance.

The First Week Anchor, Bleed, Calibrate

Install day on our Cedar Falls 2 post car lift took about six hours from unpacking to first empty cycle. Anchor bolt drilling was the loudest and messiest part – a rotary hammer punching sixteen holes into a fresh slab throws a lot of concrete dust, and we tarp everything nearby before starting. Once anchors were set and torqued, the columns went up, the crossover components were connected, hydraulics were bled to purge air, and cables were tensioned to spec. Then a slow full-cycle test with no vehicle, watching for leaks and listening for the safety pawls.

The first customer vehicle went up on Monday morning of the following week – a Class C motorhome chassis needing a tow package installed. RV chassis are long, so pad placement on the frame rails required careful measurement, but a 15,000 lb 2 post car lift handled the weight without complaint. The owner watched every step of the first lift and asked good questions. By the end of that week he had lifted four different chassis types and was already thinking about which adapters he wanted to add to the pad kit for the mid-size camper vans that were becoming a bigger share of his work.

Month Three Exhaust and Driveline Access

Three months in, the shop had settled into a rhythm and the owner had figured out where the 2 post car lift shone and where it did not. Exhaust work on a Class C or a Sprinter-based Class B was faster than anything else in his shop – the pads on the frame kept the underside completely open, and he could roll a full exhaust replacement in about a third of the time it had taken on jack stands. Driveline access on tandem-axle rigs was also good. Long wheelbases occasionally needed the arms at their outer reach, but nothing that changed the workflow.

Where the 2-post did not shine was on trailers. Trailers, unlike motorhomes, do not have a lift-point layout that a two-post is designed for. He ended up using a mid-rise scissor for most trailer work and reserving the 2-post for chassis-based rigs. That is not a knock on the machine; it is a recognition that trailers are a different geometry. If your shop is 60 percent chassis and 40 percent trailer, plan for both machines eventually. The 2-post pays for itself on the chassis side without needing to solve every trailer job.

Month Six The Cable Adjustment Nobody Warned About

Around month six the owner called with a question that we hear from about a third of first-year customers. The safety pawls on his 2 post car lift had started clicking slightly out of sync between the two columns during raise cycles. Not a safety concern – the pawls were still catching correctly – but audibly not smooth anymore. This is a cable stretch issue. Steel lift cables stretch measurably in their first few months of heavy use, and one side always stretches slightly more than the other. The fix is a routine cable tension adjustment, and every commercial-grade 2-post has adjustment nuts built in for exactly this.

We walked him through the adjustment over a phone call in about ten minutes. He had the machine synced again before dinner. This is the kind of first-year maintenance that manuals mention but rarely emphasize, and shops that are not warned about it sometimes think their new lift has a problem. It does not. It has stretched cables, and that is expected. Beyond month six, cable stretch settles down and adjustments become annual rather than one-off. If you own a 2 post car lift, expect this at some point in the first year and know that it is a five-minute wrench job, not a service call.

One Year Later Would They Do It Again

Twelve months after install, the Cedar Falls shop had run their 2 post car lift through roughly 400 chassis-based jobs and paid for the machine in raw billable hours saved versus their pre-lift jack-stand workflow. The owner told me on the follow-up call that if he had known how much faster chassis work would be, he would have bought the lift a year sooner. He also said he wished he had budgeted for a second machine at the same time, because the bay next to it now looked strategically empty.

That is the honest first-year story. Freight showed up when we planned for it. Install went smoothly because the bay was prepped correctly. The month-six cable adjustment was the only surprise, and it was a small one. If you are running an RV or trailer shop anywhere in northeast Iowa and thinking about adding your first 2 post car lift, we can walk you through the same twelve-month arc. Give us a call at 800-674-9302 and we will start with your chassis mix and work backward to the right machine.