Welcome back to "How to Escape". This is Rahrena and today we're going to be
talking about jack stands- Where to place them in the car, what to look for, and
the type of jacks to use in certain places. Let's get started.
Here you have the three most common types of jacks that you'll encounter
when trying to lift a vehicle- On the right, you have your standard scissor
jack that comes with your spare tire. In the back, you have a floor jack. On the
left, you have jack stands. Now, each of these serves a different purpose- the
jack stands are meant to support the car when it's already up in the air because
it has notched teeth that keep it from falling back down as a safety precaution.
A floor jack (in the back) is meant to rapidly lift and then lower but not be a
permanent support for your vehicle when you're underneath it. The scissor jack is
a bit of a hybrid- they can do a little bit of both but it's not meant to be a
long-term solution either. Although the scissor jack can lift up a
corner of your car when replacing a spare tire, it's best to still be able to
lower it onto jack stands when possible. So let's compare the contact points for
each of these jacks. Your scissor jack is meant to fit around the pinch welds
of your subframe, your floor jack is meant to make contact with durable flat
surfaces of the underside of your car, and the jack stands are meant to do the
same. But now where do we put them all? As you can see, here is the arrow
notating the jack point location that you'll find in your manual and it points
to that cavity right there. Now you'll notice the pinch weld coming all the way
down this way- that's a pinch weld and subframe. You'll also notice that there's
a flat surface on this side of the pinch weld that you can't always see from the
outside. If you were to just use a flat floor jack you would come up and hit
this pinch weld and bend it as you can see that there are some bends that are
quickly on the side of the road, you slide it in place and crank it up, no big
deal because you're doing a pretty quick job. However, if you're going to have your
car up in the air for an extended period of time, you're gonna want to use jack
stands. But then how do these two different heads compete for that space?
Well, you can see the shoulder on the top of the scissor jack sticks up and it'll
actually make contact with this top surface up here on the other side of the
pinch weld. So now what we do is we use our scissor jack and we're going to
scoot it back maybe about eight inches or so- just so that we have enough room
for our floor jack to scoot in from the side and plug into that cavity... So let's
get started...
Now that we have the car up we have enough room to put our floor jack in
place, and now we lower the car down
Get the rod out of the way and pull it out... and there's your jack stand in the correctly
manual notated lifting points, in order to not damage the pinch welds of the
subframe, what you can do take a simple hockey puck you pick up
from Walmart, chop it down the middle and you'll have two halves that you can plug
into the cavity to support the flat surface of the floor jack. Alright so the
reasons the magnets help, is because you can go anywhere along the inside of the
pinched subframe and stick it on there to still leave room for your jack stand...
Position your floor jack and go
and then lower it as needed of course.
All right, so that basically wraps up our video today talking about jack stands,
the different types, and the different places to put them when lifting up our
escapes. Again, this cut hockey puck idea with the magnets pretty slick saw that
on the forums- If you have any questions or suggestions to make this
better please post it in the comments section on the YouTube video. If you
thought it was helpful please LIKE it, SHARE it, and always, if you haven't
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