Last spring an RV and trailer service shop in West Des Moines added restoration and metal fabrication work to their lineup and needed a car lift automotive setup that could handle project cars alongside travel trailers and toy haulers. This article tells the first-year story of that install, from the site survey we ran in April, through the arm-configuration decision that almost went the wrong way, through the first ALI inspection twelve months later. If you are in the metro area thinking about adding a full-rise car lift automotive rig to a shop that is not strictly car-focused, this walkthrough covers the pitfalls we saw and how we solved them.
Restoration and mixed-service shops across West Des Moines and the metro: we stock 2-post and 4-post lifts sized for classic cars, project trucks, and modern chassis alike.
April: The Site Survey and the Slab Question
The West Des Moines shop we worked with occupies a former farm implement dealer building near the interstate. The main service bay is 30 by 60 feet with a 16-foot ceiling and a slab that turned out to be 6 inches of good 4,000 psi concrete over engineered fill, poured in 2002 when the previous owner did a renovation. That slab was ideal for a heavy car lift automotive install and gave us room to place a full-rise two-post anywhere in the working footprint without worrying about pad reinforcement.
The survey took about ninety minutes. We measured ceiling height at four candidate column positions, checked overhead for lighting and gas lines, ran a rebound hammer at each anchor location for a compressive-strength reading, and looked at where the electrical panel sat relative to the proposed lift positions. All four positions cleared. We settled on the northeast corner of the bay because it left the widest lane between the lift and the two adjacent trailer service bays. That geometry matters more than shop owners think, because it decides where a project car can rest for weeks at a time without blocking the trailer work that pays the bills.
May: The Symmetric vs Asymmetric Arm Decision
The single biggest choice in the whole project was arm configuration. Symmetric arms swing evenly front and back and hold a car centered between the columns. Asymmetric arms are shorter at the front and longer at the back, letting the car sit slightly behind the column centerline and putting the driver door in front of the column instead of behind it. Asymmetric is the default choice for modern car service because it makes door opening easier and puts the vehicle’s center of gravity closer to the columns.
For a restoration and mixed-service shop, the answer is not automatic. Symmetric arms handle full-size trucks, dually pickups, and travel trailer tow vehicles better because those trucks have a rearward-biased weight distribution and long wheelbases. Asymmetric arms handle classic cars, project builds, and modern daily drivers better. This shop was going to see both. After walking through the last twelve months of their service log with the owner, we settled on asymmetric because the restoration work would be the growing side of the business. That decision was almost reversed twice, and if we had been wrong the fix would have been a set of longer front adapters, not a lift replacement. The car lift automotive brands we spec, Rotary and Challenger, both allow arm-length changes without column changes.
June: Install Week and Anchor Drilling
The lift arrived on a Tuesday. A Rotary SPOA10 two-post asymmetric package, three-phase 208V, symmetric-to-asymmetric arm adapter kit included, and an air line reel add-on for the compressor drop on the wall behind the lift. Install started Wednesday morning. Anchor drilling was the longest single task, about four hours to lay out the eight-anchor pattern, drill each hole to depth, blow out the dust, and epoxy-set the anchors.
The critical detail on any car lift automotive install is column plumbness. If the columns are not perfectly vertical, the arms carry uneven load and cable tension drifts over time. We use a laser plumb bob and iterate the anchor torque in a star pattern until both columns come in within a quarter degree of true. That took another two hours. Wire pull from the panel ran about three hours. First raise of the empty lift, with calibration and safety-latch check, took forty-five minutes. Total install time, two and a half days, exactly on schedule. The shop was back to normal trailer work by Friday afternoon with the new car lift automotive rig sitting ready in the corner bay for its first project vehicle Monday morning.
July: The First Project Car and What We Learned
Their first project car went on the lift the second Monday after install. It was a 1970s American full-size two-door being reshelled for a customer, and it weighed roughly 4,200 lb. The asymmetric arms picked it up cleanly on the factory frame rails. The one issue that surfaced was arm pad height. The stock rubber pads Rotary ships work well on modern unibody cars but sit slightly too low for old body-on-frame cars with tall pinch welds. We shipped over a set of stackable adapters that afternoon, and they were in place before the second project car showed up two weeks later.
That is the kind of first-year friction we watch for and solve on the fly. A shop that has never run a full-rise car lift automotive setup will hit two or three small compatibility issues in the first few months, and none of them are dramatic if the supplier is close enough to solve them fast. We stock arm pads, stackable adapters, and truck-frame extensions in Ames and can have them in West Des Moines by end of day. That responsiveness is what turns a first-year install from a headache into a reliable tool.
September: Restoration and Metal Work Under the Lift
By late summer the shop had three project cars in rotation and had built a workflow that used the car lift automotive rig for weld work, chassis inspection, and floor pan replacement. Restoration work on a lift is fundamentally different from routine service. A car sits on the lift for days at a time, sometimes weeks, while metal work progresses. That means the lift needs to sit at a working height for extended periods, needs to have its safety latches engaged reliably, and needs to be positioned so that welding sparks do not fall onto hydraulic hoses or electrical cabinets.
We repositioned the compressor drop and the electrical drop after the first month to give more clearance between welding stations and the lift’s control box. That was a $200 fix, but it prevented a scenario where a wandering spark could have hit a hose. Restoration shops need to think about lift placement in three dimensions, not just floor plan. Ceiling clearances, spark shielding, and welding cable routing all belong in the layout conversation. We did that walkthrough in September and it has stayed clean since.
January: Winter Load and Cold-Start Behavior
West Des Moines shop buildings get cold. Even a heated shop drops below 40 F overnight, and hydraulic fluid in a car lift automotive pump group thickens as it cools. First raise of a winter morning takes about 20 percent longer than a summer raise, which is normal and expected. Rotary spec sheets note this and recommend a five-minute idle raise cycle after the fluid has been below 45 F overnight.
We covered that in the training walkthrough at install and reminded the shop lead again in early January. No issues, but it is a real behavior worth naming for anyone new to running a full-rise lift in an Iowa winter. If your shop is unheated, the fluid thickening is more pronounced and the pump group works harder. We recommend a fluid change from the factory-fill weight to a slightly lower viscosity if you run in an unheated bay, and we stock the correct hydraulic fluid for both configurations. Winter is when cheap lifts start to show their weaknesses; a good one runs the same way in January as it does in July.
April: First ALI Inspection, One Year Later
Exactly twelve months after install we came back for the first annual ALI inspection. Everything checked out. Cable tension within spec, latch engagement clean on all four positions, anchor torque unchanged from install, hydraulic seals dry, hose fittings tight. Total inspection time was about an hour. We changed the hydraulic fluid at the twelve-month mark as a preventive measure, which is not strictly required but is a habit we recommend on high-use lifts.
Twelve months in, the shop was doing four to six project cars in rotation, plus their normal trailer and RV work, and the car lift automotive rig had performed exactly as spec’d. The owner told us the decision they most second-guess is the arm-configuration choice, and now with a full year of use they say asymmetric was right for the mix they ended up with. That kind of feedback is why we spend ninety minutes on a site survey before we sell a lift. The right car lift automotive package for a specific West Des Moines restoration shop is not a catalog decision, it is a workflow decision. See also our arm configuration guide and ALI inspection checklist.
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