A collector in Cedar Falls who stores twelve cars in a heated barn decided he was tired of dragging brake service work to a shop, and he called us in early spring about buying his first 2 post car lift. The story of that install, from freight day through the first brake job through the twelfth car up in the air, is worth writing down because his situation is common: high-value hobby cars, a private shop building, no forklift on site, and no experience unloading commercial-grade equipment. Here is how the year played out, what worked, what almost went sideways on delivery day, and what a 2 post car lift feels like to own after the first twelve months.
Symmetric and asymmetric configurations from 9,000 to 12,000 lb, sized for classic, exotic, and modern collector cars.
Why a 2 post car lift beat a 4-post for his brake work
When a Cedar Falls collector called about brake service specifically, the choice between a 2 post car lift and a 4-post was actually not close for his mix of work. A 4-post is a wonderful storage lift and it is fine for oil changes and fluid work, but brakes require the wheels to hang free so you can pull them, spin the rotor to check runout, and reset caliper pistons without weight on them. A lift that gets the wheels off the ground by lifting the frame or unibody is exactly what brake work wants.
For a twelve-car collection with a mix of American muscle, an early Ferrari, and a couple of British roadsters, pad flexibility on a 2 post car lift matters too. The pickup points on a 1965 Mustang are different from the ones on a 2002 Ferrari 360 and different again from a 1971 MG-B. A 2-post with adjustable arms and drop-end pads handles all three; a 4-post makes brake service painful on cars with body-color rocker panels that hate ramp entry. He picked a 10,000 lb symmetric with drop-end arms. See our 2-post versus 4-post breakdown for the fuller comparison.
The freight quote and the surprise at the barn end of the driveway
Freight to Cedar Falls came in at $525, standard flatbed, three-day transit from the manufacturer’s warehouse. The estimate seemed reasonable and matched what we quoted him during the sale. The surprise was that his private drive turns sharply about 200 feet before the barn, and the flatbed carrier was quick to note when the driver called ahead that a full 53-foot trailer was not going to make the corner. The solution was a smaller carrier — a 26-foot straight truck — which the freight broker was willing to accommodate but which added $180 to the freight bill.
That kind of last-mile problem shows up on maybe one in five rural or semi-rural deliveries, and if you know your driveway is a challenge you want to flag it during the freight quote and not on delivery day. A shorter truck cost him a couple hundred dollars extra; a stuck flatbed at the end of the drive costs a lot more and delays the whole install. For a Cedar Falls delivery to a barn behind a house, always volunteer the driveway geometry up front to the freight broker.
Unloading without a forklift and the improvised rig that worked
He did not own a forklift, did not want to rent one for the day, and his neighbor with a skid steer was out of state. The improvised rig that worked was a chain hoist rated for 2,000 pounds, hung from a barn joist directly above where the truck would spot. The freight driver lowered the truck’s lift-gate — he had ordered lift-gate service, which added eighty dollars — and the crated columns slid off the lift-gate onto a low dolly. From there the chain hoist did the vertical work, lifting each crated column just enough to slide the dolly out from under and let it set on shop-floor 4x4s.
Total unload time was ninety minutes, longer than a forklift would have been, but it worked. The chain hoist is a modest tool that most collector barns already own for engine work, and if you do not have a forklift it is the second-best answer. Do not try to muscle a 2 post car lift column off a lift-gate with two people and a strap — they are top-heavy and unpredictable, and the risk of dropping one is not worth saving 90 minutes.
Install day: the electrician who almost forgot about us
The lift was scheduled to install on a Wednesday morning at 8 AM, and the electrician was booked for 7 AM to have the dedicated 220V circuit ready when the install crew got started. At 7:20 AM there was no electrician, and no phone call. Our install lead called the electrician’s office and learned that he had been dispatched to a different job. The office promised a replacement by 10 AM, and the replacement showed up at 11:15 with the wrong wire gauge in his truck. He ran to the Home Depot in Cedar Falls, came back at 1 PM, and finished the circuit by 2:30 PM.
We got the lift standing, anchored, and hydraulic-lined by 4 PM the same day, which is faster than it sounds because we had prepped everything else in the barn while waiting on the electrician. The lesson for anyone booking a 2 post car lift install with a separate electrician: call the electrician’s office the day before, at 3 PM, and confirm the appointment in writing. It is a small step that would have saved four hours on this job.
The first brake job on the new 2 post car lift
The first brake job on the new 2 post car lift was a full front-pad-and-rotor swap on his 1970 Camaro SS. Frame-on-body car, easy pickup points at the frame rails just inboard of the rocker, drop-end pads made contact clean. He lifted the car to about 50 inches — chest height for standing brake work — and set the mechanical locks. Total time from car in the barn to wheels off the ground: about seven minutes.
Brake work at chest height changes everything about how you do the job. You can see the caliper bolts, you can see the rotor runout, you can walk your torque wrench in and out without a floor creeper, and you can move brake fluid without lying under a fender. The Camaro job took him about ninety minutes total, and he told us he had budgeted a full afternoon based on how the same job used to go on jack stands. The 2 post car lift bought him a full afternoon of his life back on that job alone, and every job after it produced a similar delta.
Month six: rotor swaps on the Ferrari and what changed
Six months into ownership, he pulled the Ferrari 360 up on the lift for a full rotor and pad swap all around. The Ferrari sits low and the pickup points are documented in the shop manual — inboard rocker seams with the factory-supplied puck adapters. He had bought a set of aftermarket rubber pucks for the pads that matched the Ferrari’s factory jack points, and the drop-end arms on his 2 post car lift got the pads down to about 3.8 inches at collapsed, which just barely cleared the rocker.
The rotor swap on the Ferrari took him about six hours across two afternoons — brake fluid replacement, caliper piston reset, new pads, new rotors, everything. He said the moment he realized the lift had earned itself was around bolt number eight of the front driver-side caliper: he was standing upright with a torque wrench, arms unfolded, and there was no floor creeper involved. That is the intangible thing this kind of lift gives a collector; the fatigue premium of brake work drops to almost nothing when you are not on your back.
A year of brake work on a 2 post car lift — the collector’s verdict
Twelve months in, the Cedar Falls collector has done brake service on eight of his twelve cars, plus various fluid work and one full clutch swap on the MG. The the lift has cycled roughly 60 times — not a heavy load, well within light-duty use, and the lift is essentially cosmetically new. His annual maintenance was a grease of both arm pins, a wipe of the cylinder rods, and a check of the anchor torque. Total time investment: about twenty minutes.
His verdict on the year is that if he had to do it again, he would have bought the lift five years earlier. He estimates it has saved him twelve to fifteen full afternoons of shop time in the first year alone, which for a hobby operation is essentially all of his usable weekend hours. If you are a collector in Cedar Falls or anywhere in the Cedar Valley thinking about a the lift for your storage barn, call 800-674-9302 or email [email protected] and we will walk you through the same site-and-freight questions we asked him.
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