How to Place a Floor Jack Under a Car

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Nate McCullough on behalf of Expert Village. In the following clips we're going to talk about the proper way to repack, grease, and adjust your vehicles wheel bearings. In this clip we're going to talk about the proper placement of your floor jack. On a bigger vehicle like this, I happen to have a Ford Explorer we're working on today. If you were to take and put the jack on the pinch weld, or the frame of the vehicle you would have to jack it up several feet in order to get the tire off the ground. So what we're going to do is eliminate the suspension travel by jacking up directly on the vehicles front axle. What that will do is pretty much pick the vehicle up right from where it's sitting instead of the body coming up off of the tire and then the tire coming up. We're going to apply all of our jacking leverage directly to the vehicle. The only distance that we are going to have to travel is the amount of compression that is applied to the tire. Okay, What I'm aiming for right now, this like I said is a Ford Explorer, I am shooting right for the radius arm, underneath the shock absorber. As you can see, you put very little time into getting the vehicle off the ground. You're going to want to make sure and do that. If it was a lighter duty, like a passenger car, with much less suspension travel it would be okay to go to the vehicles pinch weld. As you can see, what I've done is placed my floor jack receiver assembly directly below the shock absorber mount. When they design and engineer the vehicle that is going to be one of the geometric center points. You're going to get your best force application right beneath the shock absorber. When you take and jack up a vehicle this way you are picking up the suspension instead of picking up the body, letting the suspension hang and collapse all the way down and then having to jack it all the way up. If we weren't at this point right here, if we were back say at the frame of the vehicle we would have our floor jack up to about here, to get the tire off the ground."