How Does a Car Lift Work?

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Chuck Orlandi with Miami Shores Auto Repair, here in Miami Shores, Florida. OK, the way a vehicle lift works, the shop lift that we use to lift cars, there could be two different types of lifts; we have electric lifts, and we also have a hydraulic lift. The old hydraulic post lifts, I still have one left, I use it for big trucks because it does lift a lot of weight. I don't use it that much, but sometimes we use it. And then the other lift would be the electric lifts, they have twin posts. And what happens there is you use side mounted, what do you call them, the lift arms, they go underneath the car, and when you lift the car, you have the whole bottom of the car open to work on, where the post lift is right in the center, and it, when it lifts up, you can't work on things like the transmission, you know the drive shaft, any of that. It's, it's in the way, the lift is in the way of working on that. So, again with the lifts, you have to deal with safety issues, you know, they could break when the car is up in the air. I've had that happen one time over the years, it was an incident that happened, one of the cables over head broke. But you do have safety latches that are like, every I think six or twelve inches it'll have a safety catch, so when a cable does break, the car won't drop completely off the lift, it just drops a couple inches."