How to Jack Up Car: Restoration Tips

"Hi! I'm Doug and I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods and we are going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. Bending over is bad for your body and it takes more time. So we want to get the car at a good comfortable work height for a man who's at rest...a guy who's sitting. So we jack the car up, using a good hydraulic floor jack. And the right place to jack-up a car is under something sturdy. Even a light weight car like a Miata has a good structural member built into the floor of it. So pretty much anywhere along this structural member here, you can jack. The next thing you do...I've always kind of got a rule...I'm not going to put myself in any position where I'm the softest thing between the car and the ground. So here we'll use a good heavy jack stand. This is probably an eight or ten-ton jack stand. I don't buy heavy jack stands because I like to waste money; I get them because it's the strongest. It's more durable. So I put the rear jack stand under a suspension arm. They are usually pretty well anchored to a car, and well into the center of the car. If you put it out here, as the weight gets settled on it, it might slide up the member. The other jack stand we are going to put under this main frame rail here. While the jack is still close to the car (there's no weight on it), I give the car a good shake to make sure it's nice and sturdy."