A West Des Moines Collector’s First Year with a 2 Post Car Lift

A West Des Moines collector called us last spring for a 2 post car lift he was putting in a private garage — the kind of clean, insulated space where a first-generation muscle car and a modern grand tourer both need to breathe. What follows is the twelve-month arc of that install, from the freight call through the first suspension job through the six-month would-I-do-anything-differently retrospective. We are Auto Lift Services out of Ames, Iowa, and this is a first-year ownership story we have told a hundred times, anonymized to protect the customer.

Week one: picking a 2 post car lift for a private collection

Week one was the conversation. The West Des Moines collector had shortlisted three 2 post car lift options from a mix of national suppliers and local installers. He knew he wanted a ten-thousand-pound commercial-grade asymmetric — a lift heavier than his heaviest car, with the door-swing advantage of asymmetric arms. His ceiling measured just over twelve feet at the lowest obstruction, so an overhead configuration was feasible. His concrete was a recent pour with documentation. What he did not know was which brand to trust for a low-cycle private collection where the lift might see one weekend of use a month and then sit idle. We walked him through Rotary and Challenger commercial-grade options and explained why we would not push a lower-tier residential-only lift into a garage that would eventually hold five figures of collectible steel. The right lift for a collector is not the cheapest lift — it is the lift he will still trust in year fifteen.

The freight call: LTL, liftgate, and forklift options

Week two was freight. A 2 post car lift ships as two column crates plus a hydraulic power unit and an arm bundle — typically two thousand pounds of freight across three or four pieces. The collector had no forklift. His garage was clean, but the driveway was steep enough that a straight LTL drop-off would have left crates at the top of the drive with nothing to move them inside. We planned around that. Our shipping options for a residential drop include LTL with a liftgate — which lowers pieces to the ground but does not move them — or LTL with an inside-drop service, which is more expensive but delivers to the garage floor. We chose liftgate plus a scheduled meet: our install crew arrived the same afternoon as freight and brought a pallet jack. The collector’s neighbor turned out to have a small skid loader with forks, which helped, but we planned for the case where he did not. Never plan a residential lift delivery without confirming exactly how each crate gets from truck to garage.

Unloading day at the West Des Moines garage

Unloading day was the first real test of the plan. The freight truck arrived with a liftgate driver who set each crate on the driveway. Our two-person install crew and the collector’s neighbor with the skid loader moved the column crates into the garage in about forty minutes. The power unit came in by hand truck — it weighs roughly a hundred and fifty pounds and unpacks awkwardly. The arm bundle is manageable by two people. We opened each crate on the garage floor and inventoried against the packing list before touching any tools. That inventory step catches shipping damage and missing accessories, and it protects the customer’s freight claim window. On this install we found one bent pad adapter — cosmetic, functional, but noted. We photographed it, filed the claim, and continued the install. That level of documentation is standard on every 2 post car lift install we run.

Install day: anchoring, squaring, and first cycle

Install day started with column layout. We marked the anchor pattern on the concrete using the manufacturer’s template, drilled the anchor holes with a rotary hammer, vacuumed the holes clean, and set the anchor bolts. Each column stands on four anchors torqued to the manual spec. Column plumb matters — we checked plumb in two directions on each column with a level before torquing anchors to final. Overhead crossbeam went up next; on a two-person install that is a lift-together move, sometimes with a third body for spotting. The hydraulic power unit mounted on the driver-side column, hoses ran across the overhead crossbeam, and equalization cables threaded through the sheaves and terminated at each carriage. First cycle we ran empty to bleed air, then with a light load, then a stopwatch on descent to confirm both carriages equalized within spec. The whole install ran a full workday.

First suspension and shock job on the new 2 post car lift

The collector’s first job on his new 2 post car lift was a full front-suspension refresh on a European coupe he had been saving for the moment. He pulled it into the bay, positioned the asymmetric arms under factory lift points he had located on a chassis diagram, and raised the vehicle. That first raise was the moment every new lift owner remembers. He worked the front control arms, replaced worn ball joints, and swapped both front shocks. The undercar clearance at full stroke gave him room to stand upright and turn a torque wrench without stooping. He called us mid-job with one question — whether he could remove an arm-restraint pin while the vehicle was up to reposition an arm — and the answer was no, arms are set before the raise and stay put until the car is on the ground. That is a safety rule. He did the job right, and the coupe rolled out three hours later.

Six months in: what we would do differently

Six months in, the collector called with a retrospective. He was happy with the 2 post car lift itself. His only complaint was small: he wished he had spec’d taller stack adapters up front, because the third car he ended up buying — a lifted truck he did not own on install day — needed adapters he had to source later. That is a common realization on a first-year retrospective. Buyers spec pads for the cars they own today, not the cars they will own in five years. Our advice on every collector install now is to spec one full set of standard pad adapters plus one extra tall stack, even if the customer thinks they will never need it. The stack adapters cost less than half a service call to add later, and they sit on a shelf until the day a lifted truck rolls in.

Year one: what a collector’s 2 post car lift actually costs to own

At the one-year mark, the collector’s cost of ownership on his 2 post car lift was straightforward. Purchase and freight one time; install labor one time; two annual filter and fluid checks he did himself; a set of extra pad adapters he added at month seven; and one ALI-authorized annual inspection we ran on a service visit. No cable service, no anchor retorque outside the ninety-day check, no unplanned failures. Twelve months of low-cycle collector use is easy on a commercial-grade lift — the lift is engineered for shop duty, and a private garage is a tiny fraction of that. His first-year total cost of ownership was well under what a shop would spend on filter changes alone. If you are considering a lift for a private collection, the ownership math is friendlier than most collectors expect. Related: freight and delivery guide.