A collector we work with just outside West Des Moines is finishing his first year with a new car lift, and the pattern of that year is worth walking through for anyone else in central Iowa who stores vehicles at home. He started with three long-term projects and one weekly driver, needed reliable overhead storage, wanted the option to do suspension and shock work himself, and had a garage that could go either two-post or four-post depending on how he committed the square footage. Auto Lift Services handled the install and the first cylinder service, and here is what year one actually looked like from crate to first rebuild kit.
The double-stack collector setup we install across the Des Moines metro. Rolling jacks and casters included on most configurations.
Picking a car lift when you own more than one project
For a collector with multiple vehicles, the lift choice is a storage question first and a service question second. Two-post lifts leave the wheels hanging and give perfect access for suspension work, but they occupy the same square footage whether a car is on them or not sitting empty. Four-post lifts store the vehicle safely with wheels loaded on the runways, and with a set of rolling jacks under the vehicle they give most of the service access a two-post provides for suspension work.
Our West Des Moines collector chose a 9,000 lb four-post with rolling jacks and casters after we walked through his three project cars and his weekly driver line-up. The four-post let him double-stack one project stored up top and one on the floor underneath, while still giving him the ability to work on suspension by lifting the vehicle off its wheels with the rolling jacks when needed. It is not the right car lift for a shop that lives on wheels-off work as its primary daily job, but for a collector doing occasional service between storage runs, it is nearly perfect for the mix.
Install day at a West Des Moines shop
Install for a four-post in a residential garage is faster than a two-post because there is no anchor drilling into an existing slab. The lift free-stands on its own base pads and the concrete never gets touched. Our crew delivered on a Thursday morning, uncrated in the driveway, wheeled the columns into the garage on the casters, positioned them against the collector’s chalk marks, and had the deck lift-and-lock tested by early afternoon. Total on-site time was under six hours including the walkthrough with the owner.
The one hiccup was ceiling height. His garage measured just under 11 feet at the low point of the truss, and the lift’s maximum rise put the top of a full-height vehicle within about eight inches of the ceiling. That was fine for his projects but would have been tight for a Sprinter or a lifted truck. This is why we measure before delivery every time on every job. If your ceiling is borderline we tell you before the crate arrives, not after unpacking on the driveway. A car lift that cannot rise to its rated height because of the ceiling is one you will resent for a decade of ownership.
The first six months of suspension and shock work
The collector’s first big project on the new lift was a shock and strut refresh on a wagon he had been putting off for two years across the shop calendar. With the vehicle up on the deck and the rolling jacks placed under the frame rails, he unloaded the wheels and had complete access to the strut mounts, control-arm bolts, and the sway bar end links. He commented later that the same job on his old drive-on ramps would have taken twice as long and would have felt noticeably less safe on the last few bolts.
Over the next six months he did a full front-and-rear bushing refresh on a second project, replaced a set of coilovers on the daily driver, and rotated all three vehicles through the lift for oil and driveline service. The lift saw about ninety raise-lower cycles in six months, which is on the light end for a collector and well within the design duty cycle. He tracked every use in a shop log, which is the habit we recommend for anyone who wants to catch wear early on their car lift and stay ahead of a leak.
When a cylinder starts to weep: what we saw
Around the eleventh month, the collector noticed a small amount of hydraulic fluid on the deck near the cylinder mount. Nothing dramatic, just a slow weep after the deck had been sitting at height for several hours with a stored car. He called us and we drove out that Saturday to look. What we found was a slight rod-seal seep, the kind that starts as a hair-thin film on the rod and grows into an actual leak over weeks if ignored. It is the earliest warning sign that a rebuild kit is due for installation.
On a residential four-post at less than a year old this is uncommon, but the collector’s use pattern of parking a car up at height for days at a time while working around it puts a specific kind of pressure on the seal that is different from raise-and-lower cycles in a shop. Anytime a car lift holds a static load for hours, the seal wear looks different from a shop lift’s wear pattern under repeated cycling. We ordered a rebuild kit that afternoon and set up the actual repair visit for the following weekend.
Rebuild kit installed, downtime under one afternoon
The rebuild took about three hours from the time the deck came down to the time we ran the function test with a car on it. We depressurized the system, drained the cylinder, pulled the rod out, replaced the rod seal, the wiper, and the O-rings from the kit, reassembled with fresh hydraulic fluid, and cycled the lift six times to purge air out of the lines. The collector watched the whole process because he wanted to know how to do it himself the next time, which is exactly the right instinct for someone who plans to own the equipment for decades.
Total cost was the price of the rebuild kit and our labor for the Saturday visit. Compared to replacing the cylinder outright, the savings were substantial and the downtime was minimal. More importantly, the lift went back into service the same day and the collector had complete confidence in it again. This is the story we tell first-year car lift owners: the first sign of a leak is not a crisis. It is a scheduled maintenance moment if you catch it early. Waiting until the deck drips actively is what turns a small kit into a much larger problem.
What the second-year checklist looks like
Going into year two we gave the collector a maintenance sheet with four items: check hydraulic fluid level and top off if needed, inspect the cables for fray or corrosion at the sheaves, verify all four column locks engage cleanly at each position, and grease the roller bearings on the sheave assemblies. The whole checklist takes about thirty minutes twice a year and catches nearly every problem before it becomes urgent or expensive.
He is now planning a fourth project car and considering whether to add a two-post in the same garage for wheels-off work on the metal projects coming next. That is a conversation we love having with any collector because the two-post plus four-post combination is what most serious hobby garages end up with over a five-to-ten-year timeline. A car lift purchase is not a one-time decision for anyone who catches the collecting bug seriously. It is the start of a slowly expanding shop, and we plan for that expansion when we quote the very first unit on the very first visit.
What we do for collectors in West Des Moines
Auto Lift Services covers the Des Moines metro weekly and West Des Moines is essentially our home turf. We install home-garage lifts for collectors every month and we service them at whatever interval the owner wants, from a one-time first-year visit to an annual maintenance plan on a calendar. Rebuild kits, cables, and adapters for every brand we sell live at our Ames warehouse, which is a fifty-minute drive from most West Des Moines subdivisions on I-35.
If you are a collector thinking about your first lift or your second addition, explore our home storage lifts and 4-post lift collections, or call 800-674-9302. We will walk your garage, measure your usable envelope, and quote a couple of options based on the vehicles you actually own and the projects you actually plan. We take collector shops seriously because these are personal projects and the tools should hold up to the years the projects will take.
Our Clients Include: