A Farm Shop Buyer’s Checklist for Automotive Two Post Lifts (Marion, Iowa)

A farmer outside Marion called us in February because he was tired of dropping an oil pan on his back on a cold concrete floor. He runs a mixed operation, keeps three pickups and a couple of older cars going himself, and had been pricing automotive two post lifts online for about six months without pulling the trigger. His hesitation was reasonable: he’d read horror stories about cables letting go, he wasn’t sure his pole barn slab could take it, and he didn’t want to spend serious money on something he’d have to babysit. We spent an hour on the phone building him a checklist. That checklist is what follows, because his questions are the same ones we field from farm shops across eastern Iowa every month.

Item One: Know Your Real Heaviest Vehicle

Start here, and be honest with yourself. Farm shops are notorious for capacity creep. You buy a 9,000 lb unit sized for the half-ton and the wife’s SUV, and eighteen months later you’re staring at a three-quarter-ton crew cab with a flatbed, a fuel tank, and a toolbox — and that truck is knocking on 8,500 lb before you add a full tank of diesel. The published curb weight on a window sticker is not the weight of the vehicle sitting in your yard.

Our standing recommendation for farm and rural shops is 10,000 lb minimum, and 12,000 lb if there’s any chance a one-ton or a loaded service truck ends up in the bay. The price difference between those tiers is meaningful but not enormous, and capacity is the one specification you can never add later. We also tell people to think about distribution: a two-post carries the vehicle on four pads, and a nose-heavy diesel puts a disproportionate share on the front arms. Asymmetric column designs, which rotate the posts slightly and use shorter front arms, help balance that and give you more door-opening room. For pickups and older cars — which is most of what a farm shop sees — a symmetric configuration with equal-length arms is often the better fit, because the vehicle sits centered and the load spreads evenly. This is the kind of detail that doesn’t show up in a price comparison but shows up every time you use the thing.

Item Two: Core Your Slab Before You Order

Pole barn concrete is a gamble. We’ve cored slabs in eastern Iowa that came in at a beautiful six inches with rebar and slabs poured the same year, two miles away, that measured three and a half with wire mesh floating uselessly near the surface. You cannot tell by looking, and you absolutely cannot tell by remembering what the concrete guy said in 2009.

The requirement for most automotive two post lifts is four inches minimum of 3,000 PSI concrete, unreinforced or better, with adequate distance from any expansion joint or slab edge. Anchor bolts need roughly six inches of clearance from a joint, which sounds like nothing until you realize your barn has control joints on a ten-foot grid right where you wanted the columns. Rent a core drill or hire it out, pull a plug in each of the two column locations, and measure. If it’s short, the fix is a cutout — typically a pad about ten by twelve feet, saw-cut, removed, and repoured to six inches with rebar, then cured a minimum of 28 days before anchors go in. That’s a real expense and a real delay, but it’s cheaper than an anchor pulling out with a truck in the air. We’ve never once regretted telling a customer to pour concrete first. We have regretted the times we let someone talk us out of it.

Item Three: Understand The Cables Before You Buy

This is the item that worries farm shop buyers most, and it deserves the attention. On a two-post, the lifting is done by hydraulic cylinders — the cables are equalization cables. Their job is to keep the two carriages rising and falling together, not to hold the vehicle up. That distinction matters, because a lot of the fear people carry about “the cable breaking” is based on a misunderstanding of what the cable does.

That said, cables absolutely wear, and a broken equalizer cable will let one side drift out of sync, which is dangerous in its own right. Cables run over sheaves at the top and bottom of the columns, and the failure points are predictable: fraying where the strands pass over a sheave, corrosion at the threaded end fittings, and stretch that shows up as one column sitting visibly lower than the other. In a barn with an open door and Iowa humidity, corrosion is the one to watch. Salt off a winter truck accelerates it. We stock replacement cables for every major brand, and a set is far cheaper than most people assume — usually a couple hundred dollars in parts for a standard 10,000 lb unit, plus an hour or two of labor to swap and re-tension. Our article on 2-post lift cable replacement covers the process step by step.

Item Four: Set Your Inspection Intervals Now

Commercial shops in Iowa are typically running an annual ALI-certified inspection, and that’s a good baseline for a farm shop too even though nobody’s requiring it of you. But the annual is not the whole program. The real safety comes from a thirty-second look before every use and a slightly longer look monthly.

Here’s the interval structure we hand out. Daily, before the first lift: eyeball both cables for visible fray, check that the arm restraints engage when you swing an arm, and listen for the locks clicking evenly as the carriages rise. Monthly: wipe down and inspect the full cable run, check sheave rotation, look for hydraulic weeping at the cylinder rod seal and hose fittings, and verify the columns are still plumb. Annually: full inspection including anchor torque check, cable tension adjustment, lock mechanism function, and hydraulic fluid level and condition. Replace cables on condition rather than on a fixed calendar — but if you’re seeing any broken strands, any significant corrosion at the fittings, or if the unit is past ten to twelve years of regular use, plan on a set. On automotive two post lifts that sit idle for months and then get used hard during planting and harvest, we actually see more corrosion-driven wear than high-cycle shops do, because the cables sit still and damp instead of being worked and wiped.

Item Five: Plan For Oil Pan Work Specifically

Our Marion customer’s main motivation was oil pan gasket jobs, and that use case has specific requirements worth calling out. Dropping a pan means you need full unobstructed access under the engine, room to swing a pan down and out past the crossmember, and often the ability to support the engine from above or with a jack from below while you loosen mounts.

A two-post is genuinely the right tool for this, and that’s not true of every lift type — a four-post with runners under the tires puts steel exactly where you need to work. But you need rise. Getting the vehicle up to a full 72 inches or so lets you stand under it and use both hands with a wrench above your head rather than crouching. You also want to think about a rolling floor jack or a transmission jack fitting under the raised vehicle, which means keeping the bay floor clear and favoring an overhead-style unit over a baseplate model if your ceiling allows. Low-profile arms matter too if you work on cars with minimal ground clearance; standard arm pads can be too tall to slide under a lowered sedan. Most manufacturers offer low-profile arm kits or drop-in pad adapters, and it’s worth speccing them at purchase rather than adding them later. Also budget for good lighting — an underhood LED on a magnet base and a couple of shop lights aimed up will save you more frustration than any accessory on the order sheet.

Item Six: Power, Ceiling, And The Rest Of The Building

Nearly every two-post ships with a power unit that runs on 220V single phase, though 110V options exist on some smaller units and three-phase is available on commercial models. Farm shops usually have 220 available for a welder, which is convenient, but check the circuit — you want a dedicated 20 or 30 amp run to the lift rather than sharing with the compressor. A motor starving on a shared circuit will trip breakers and shorten its own life.

Ceiling height is the other building constraint. Overhead-style units generally want 11 to 12 feet of true clearance to the underside of the crossbeam; baseplate models can fit under 10 feet. Pole barns with 12-foot sidewalls and trusses are usually fine for overhead, but measure to the bottom chord of the truss, not the peak. Watch for hanging unit heaters, which are extremely common in Iowa farm shops and hang right where you don’t want them. Relocating a heater is often easier than downgrading the lift. Finally, think about the whole footprint — you need room to open vehicle doors on both sides, three to four feet of walking clearance past each column, and enough length ahead and behind that you’re not blocking the shop. If you send us building dimensions, we’ll sketch a layout for you at no charge. Between capacity, concrete, cables, and clearance, most of the risk in buying automotive two post lifts comes from things you can verify in an afternoon with a tape measure and a phone call to 800-674-9302. See also our overview of the lift installation process.

Item Seven: Buy Where Parts Exist In Ten Years

The last item on the checklist is the one people skip. A lift is a twenty-year purchase. The company you buy from needs to be able to sell you a cable set, a cylinder seal kit, a lock dog, an arm restraint gear, or a power unit motor a decade from now — and plenty of the cheapest imports online cannot do that. We regularly get calls from people who bought an off-brand unit at auction or from a defunct web seller and now can’t source a single part. Sometimes we can cross-reference a component and sometimes we genuinely can’t help them.

For farm shops we typically point toward BendPak or Atlas at the value end and Rotary or Challenger if the shop does enough work to justify commercial-grade equipment. All four have real parts pipelines, and we stock common wear items for them in Iowa. That means when a cable frays during harvest week, you’re not waiting three weeks on a container from overseas. Used equipment can be a good deal — we’ve placed plenty of quality used automotive two post lifts with farm shops and hobbyists — but only when we can identify the make and model and confirm parts are still made. If a seller can’t tell you the manufacturer and model number, walk away. Whatever you save on the purchase, you’ll pay back the first time something wears out. Give us a call and we’ll help you sort a good used find from a boat anchor before you hand over money.