How to Jack Up a Car

Video Transcript

"MARK BLOCKER: In this segment, we're going to cover jacking the vehicle. We're doing the rear brakes on this vehicle so we'll be jacking it up from the rear of the vehicle. Prior to jacking the vehicle, we want to make sure that the vehicle is in park. The parking brake is set. In a previous training video on front brakes, I put out a tip about breaking the lug nuts loose prior to jacking the vehicle because this vehicle is equipped with rear wheel disc brakes that use a parking brake system, interacting with the disc brake system, we're able to apply the parking brake and that will hold the wheel while we break the lug nuts free when we got it up on the jack. And later, we release and that will give us the ability to rotate the wheel for any servicing that we might need to do. So, once we've got--make sure the wheels are pointed straight on the vehicle since we're lifting it from the rear. We want to make sure the front wheels are pointing straight forward. It gives a more stable platform when it's on the jacks. And parking brake set and in park, we'll go ahead and jack it up from the back using a floor jack. On this model Acura, the rear vehicle is equipped with a solid rear axle and that'll give me a good place to jack up from. I can go into the center of the rear axle and jack up the entire back half of the vehicle, both sides simultaneously and apply jack stands up underneath the frame and that will give me a good stable platform to work on and plenty of workspace available. I'm going to slide the jack up under the vehicle, turn down the hydraulic lock, turn it all the way to the right clockwise, and then just slowly, slowly lift up the jacking points where it contacts the rear axle and you make sure that you got it centered correctly, comes up into contact with it. And you know you got the jack exactly where you want it to be and as you slowly starting jacking the vehicle up, watching the vehicle as you're doing so to make sure it's going up evenly and the jack is staying in proper position. Just continue jacking the vehicle up until you get it into the work height that you're after. We're going to raise it up pretty high until we got jack stands that need to go up underneath and they require a little bit of clearance and that also gives us good working space and environment. It makes it easier to do what we're doing on the ground. Okay, that should be high enough. I'll go ahead and place the jack stands at this time. With the jack stands on this vehicle, I'm going to go ahead and place them directly under the rear axle right behind the tire, and that provides a good stable spot to hold the vehicle. And you just slide the jack stand right directly underneath the axle and slide up the adjustment until it contacts the rear axle. And when using jack stands, you want to make sure you have both jack stands set at the same height so that the car sits stable and level. If you're using wood blocks, you need to use the same procedure, make sure you have the same amount of height involved with each set of blocks so that the vehicle when you lower it down onto the load carrying device it sits level. Okay, now that we've got both jack stands placed underneath the rear axle, what we want to do is lower the jack down, let the jack stand carry the load of the vehicle. And as you release the jack, it's going to be kind of tighter. At first, you're going to feel some stiff resistance so you wouldn't want to twist. You'd be real careful 'cause once you break it free, you want to just slightly open the valve so it lowers your car down gently. There we go. Now, we've got the load of the vehicle, its weight is applied to the jack stands. I'm going to go ahead and leave the jack underneath here, just right underneath the rear axle, turn it back, make sure it's locked then I'll just jack down just a little bit just so it's snug and that provides a secondary line of defense in case we have some problem or it slides off the jack stand. It just gives you a little bit extra security and stability on the system you're working on to ensure that we don't anything to knock it off the stands. So, that concludes our segment on jacking a vehicle. Watch our next segment on removing the tire."