The oil pan gasket on a mid-eighties collector car is the job that finally convinces people to stop researching automotive two post lifts and actually buy one. A customer of ours in Waukee had four cars he rotated through the seasons, a 30×40 pole building with twelve-foot sidewalls, and a weeping pan gasket on the one he drove most. He’d done it once on jack stands, spent a Saturday on his back with a droplight, and dropped the pan bolts twice into the gravel. That was the last straw. What follows is his actual first year of ownership — how he financed it, what the payment schedule looked like, what install day involved, how the first real job went, and what broke at month ten.
Symmetric and asymmetric two post models from 9,000 to 18,000 lb, with financing available on most units. Tell us your ceiling height, slab, and vehicle list and we will quote the lift plus install as one number. Call 800-674-9302.
Month Zero: Deciding a Two Post Was the Right Answer
He almost bought a four post. That’s worth saying, because for a collector who stores vehicles, a four post is genuinely the better storage tool — drive on, park, done, and you can stack a second car underneath. But he wasn’t buying a parking garage. He was buying access to the underside of a car for real wrench work: pan gaskets, exhaust, transmission crossmembers, brake lines. With a four post, the wheels sit on runways and the suspension is loaded, which means anything involving control arms, springs, or a pan that clears the crossmember by an inch turns into a fight with a rolling jack.
A two post hangs the car by its frame or pinch welds with the wheels dangling free. For an oil pan gasket that difference is everything — you get unobstructed swing room under the engine, you can drop the crossmember if you have to, and you’re standing upright the whole time. We laid out both options honestly and he chose the two post, then solved storage by keeping the winter cars on the floor and one up on the lift. That’s the compromise most collectors land on. If storage volume is genuinely the priority and wrench access is secondary, we’ll tell you to look at four post instead; we cover that tradeoff in our comparison of two post versus four post lifts.
Month One: How the Financing Terms Actually Worked
Financing on automotive two post lifts is more common than people expect, and it’s not a dealership-style production. Most of the buyers we work with go one of three routes. Equipment lease-to-own through a third-party financier is the most common for shops — typically 24, 36, or 48 month terms, with a small documentation fee up front and a nominal buyout at the end. Approval on a solid credit profile often comes back inside a business day, and the paperwork is a couple of pages.
The second route is a business line of credit or a home equity draw, which usually beats lease rates but takes longer to arrange. The third is a plain credit card for the lift with cash for the install, which some buyers do purely for points and pay off in a month. Our Waukee customer took a 36-month lease. His schedule looked like this: a deposit at order to lock the unit and freight, the balance financed with the first payment due roughly 30 days after delivery, and level monthly payments after that with no prepayment penalty. Total monthly outlay landed in the low-to-mid hundreds — less than he was spending on a storage unit he gave up. One detail worth flagging: financiers usually fund the equipment, not the concrete work or electrical. Budget the install and any panel upgrade as cash, because that’s the piece that catches people mid-project.
Month Two: Install Day and the Concrete Question
His pole building had a five-inch slab poured five years earlier with no radiant tubing, which is close to ideal. We still scanned it before drilling, because “five inches” on a build sheet and five inches at the column footprint are not always the same number. Anchors went in, columns got plumbed and shimmed, and the equalization cables were routed and tensioned. With a 30×40 building he had room to place the lift with proper walk-around clearance on both sides, which matters more than people think — you want to open both doors of a car at height without hitting a wall or a bench.
Electrical was the one wrinkle. The building had a 60-amp subpanel with no dedicated 220 circuit near the lift location, so a local electrician ran a 30-amp 220V line to the power unit column before we arrived. We tell every buyer to get that scheduled ahead of install, because a crew standing around waiting on an electrician is the most avoidable cost in the whole project. Total install ran most of a day including the electrical wait, the break-in cycles, and the walkthrough. We ran the lift up and down empty a half-dozen times to seat the cables, checked lock engagement on both columns, set the arm restraints, and then put his heaviest car up and did it again. Twelve-foot sidewalls gave him clearfloor with room to spare.
Month Three: The Oil Pan Gasket Job That Paid for the Lift
The job that started all of this took him a little over three hours, and most of that was cleaning the mating surface properly instead of rushing it. Car went up to chest height on the locks. He pulled the splash shield, dropped the exhaust crossover, unbolted the pan, and had the whole thing on a bench while standing on his feet. The difference from the jack stand version wasn’t just comfort — it was that he could actually see the sealing surface with a light and get a scraper square to it.
The detail worth passing along is arm placement. On a unibody car you’re setting pads on pinch welds; on a body-on-frame collector car you’re on frame rails, and the pan work often means you need the car high enough to swing a pan out sideways past the crossmember. Asymmetric arm geometry helped here — with the columns rotated and the car set slightly rearward, he had door clearance and still had the front of the engine bay accessible from a step stool. He also learned to use the lift at working height rather than full height. Everyone’s instinct is to run it all the way up. For underbody work at a bench-and-tools height, mid-travel on the locks is more comfortable and easier on your neck. He estimated the job would have cost him a full weekend and a shop visit for the exhaust bolts he’d have snapped. Two or three jobs like that and the financing payment stops feeling like a payment.
Month Six: Break-In Maintenance Most Owners Skip
The first six months on new automotive two post lifts are when cables settle and fittings find their final torque, and that’s exactly when nobody’s paying attention. We give every new owner a short list. Check hydraulic fluid level after the first month — the cylinder and lines hold more than the initial fill accounts for, and a low reservoir is the number one cause of a lift that won’t reach full height. Re-check equalization cable tension at 30 days and again at 90; new cable stretches, and uneven tension shows up as one carriage arriving at the top before the other.
Grease the arm pivots and the carriage slide blocks. Look at the lock ladder teeth and listen — you should hear both columns click in unison. Wipe the cylinder rod and check for weeping at the seal. Our Waukee customer did the 30-day check, skipped the 90-day, and by month five his carriages were about three-quarters of an inch out of sync at full rise. That’s not dangerous on its own, but it puts uneven load on the arms and it’s the beginning of premature cable wear. Fifteen minutes with a wrench fixed it. We keep cables, seal kits, and lock components on the shelf in Ames and ship them out same day, and we’ve written up the common failure points in our overview of two post lift cable replacement.
Month Ten: The First Service Call
The call came in October: lift rose about halfway and stalled, motor running, no lift. That symptom set is short — low fluid, a failing pump, air in the system, or an overload valve doing its job. It was fluid, and the reason was a slow seep at a hose fitting that had been dripping onto a cardboard sheet he’d assumed was old oil from a car. Ten dollars of fittings and a top-off and he was back up.
Two things about that call are worth generalizing. First, hydraulic problems on these units are almost always boring — fluid, seals, and air, in that order of likelihood. Second, the failure was within the hydraulic warranty period, and because he had his serial number, invoice, and install record in a folder in the building, we filed and got a credit for the parts without much friction. Labor was on him, which is standard across the industry. He also called us before he tried anything creative, which we appreciate more than we can say. Among the automotive two post lifts we service across central Iowa, the ones that give owners trouble in year two are almost always the ones where somebody chased a symptom with a wrench instead of describing it to a tech first. A year in, he’s put roughly twenty jobs through it and he’s stopped thinking about the payment entirely. That’s about how it goes.
What We’d Tell the Next Buyer
If you’re a collector in the Des Moines metro with a pole building and a project list, the shape of the decision is pretty consistent. Size for the heaviest thing you’ll ever put up plus margin, which for passenger cars and half-tons means 10,000 lb, not 9,000. Measure to your lowest ceiling obstruction before you fall in love with a clearfloor model. Confirm your slab thickness with a scan rather than a memory. Get the 220V circuit run before install day. And ask for the lift and the install as one quoted number, because a cheap lift with a complicated install is not cheap.
On the money side, don’t let financing talk you into more capacity than you need, and don’t let it talk you out of a brand with parts availability. The monthly difference between a bargain unit and a well-supported one is usually smaller than one shop visit. What actually costs money over ten years is downtime and parts you can’t source — not the sticker. We stock components for every major brand out of Ames, install throughout Iowa and the surrounding states, and we’re happy to tell you when a smaller lift or a different configuration is the honest answer for your building. Call us with your ceiling height, slab spec, and vehicle list and we’ll size it in one conversation. That’s usually all it takes.
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