How to Use a Jack Stand

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Nate McCullough. In these clips we're going to talk about the proper way to inspect, remove, replace, and maintenance your vehicle's shock absorbers. In this clip I'm going to talk about my jack stand and the proper location. The jack stand is a mechanical support device and it is a fail safe mechanism so you?re not relying on the seals built into your hydraulic floor jack. As you can see the jack stand is adjustable. It has a tooth connection. This here is your release handle. What I'm going to do is slide my jack stand underneath what happens to be called the radius arm on a Ford Explorer. This component right here is called the radius arm. They are unique to Ford light trucks, including Explorers and some of their conversion vans and the F150 Series. The reason why we're placing it here it if you?re working on a truck, even the heavy duty industrial jack that I have, will only go so high. If you happen to be working on a passenger car you?re going to still want to aim for a front suspension component in order to eliminate having to jack the vehicle up excessively high. If you can't get at a suspension component you can go to what they call a vehicle's pinch weld, which is located right here. As you can see for obvious reasons we are not going to support my vehicle by the pinch weld. It's got some excessive rust going on and also being that it's a heavier truck that's going to put a lot of load here when there are much heavier duty components to use. That's the proper way to place your jack stand. What I'm going to do right now is release some of the pressure on my hydraulic floor jack to allow the radius arm, or my front suspension components to seat on my jack stand. You?re going to want to open it very slowly so that it releases very slowly."