Raise Car to Replace Front Brake Pads

Video Transcript

"MARK BLOCKER: Okay. In this segment, we're going to cover jacking your vehicle using a floor jack. The floor jack, as you can see, compared with the jack that comes equipped with the vehicle, is much larger, better built, its designed to slide up underneath the cars and get up and access a point in the frame to lift the vehicle on rather than relying on the structure of the car and the unibody on the outside edges. If you used to try and apply the small portable jack underneath where you get access to a frame, you have to crawl underneath the car to do it. It'd be extremely difficult especially with--if you had a flat tire and the car's set lower to the ground because of the tire. So, the benefits of having a floor jack, it's just the ease of operation, the safety and it's just a lot better to lift the vehicle off the frame. And the floor jacks come in a lot of different sizes and smaller ones are made that are easier to contain and carry it with your vehicle. This one here is like a two and a half ton rated industrial use. And what we're going to do is we're just going to roll it around to the front of the vehicle and then we're going to slide it up underneath and we're going to access basically the same point as we used earlier to secure the vehicle with the floor jack right underneath the sub-frame there in the front and lift the vehicle from there. Okay. The easiest way to do it is to slide the jack up underneath and get it real close to where you want it to be and then the locking mechanism for the jacks, for the hydraulics on the floor jacks is built into the handle and you just turn it all the way clockwise to lock the jack and that allows you to jack it up. To loosen the jack and release pressure, you turn it counter-clockwise. Now, what I'm going to do is once I slide it up in there, I'm just going to go real slow. I watch the head of that jack and make sure it comes up exactly where I want it to until it contacts the vehicle frame. So, I verify that I've got the jack in the right position I want it. So, once we've got the jack, we make contact with the frame and we just want to slowly lift the vehicle. As you're jacking it up, you want to watch underneath. Make sure every thing's going smoothly; the jack is staying in your position, no surprises. Stay well away from the car while you're jacking it, in case something goes wrong and the car slips and slides. Avoid any potential for injury. Now once again-same with the floor jack is--with the emergency jack or tire jack with the vehicle or any other type of jack, you only want to use a jack to lift the vehicle. Once you get the vehicle lifted, you want to place it on a jack stand, blocks or some other device to hold the load of the vehicle. You do not want to rely on the jack to do that. Please watch our next segment on jacking the vehicle using a floor jack part two."