Safe Jacking Tips and Tricks for Your Classic Car
Mark OjaMark Oja gives you a brief background on why safety is so important when jacking up your classic car. It is essential that you take the necessary precautions and use a proper jack, jack stands, and other general equipment.
Regardless of the project safety is key on jacking up your vehicle, which is a very common practice with any kind of project. You have to make sure that the vehicle is elevated off the ground in a safe manner that involves the proper type of jack, jack stands and equipment just in general in a case like this, which is a, this is a high performance car that has been lowered. A lot of performance cars have that kind of effect but not only high performance cars, but cars in general more over than not are b are very low to the ground which makes the whole jacking operation much more difficult. What we've got here is a trick that is commonly used by experts on how to get the car off the ground and get your jack underneath the vehicle. What we're going to do is we're going to take this Mustang, we're going to jack up one corner and we're going to work all the way around the vehicle until it's properly elev elevated again, safety is key mark is going to show me how he elevates a vehicle.
He's got some blocks of wood here, things that you can find around your garage. Mark, help me get this up off the ground, take our jack and slide it underneath. There are certain areas to jack under y under your vehicle. We'll walk you through some of those places in just a moment. But bottom line is, this pad has to contact the frame in a very secure spot so we can get our jack stand underneath it.
Uh Key ingredient is if the jack still doesn't fit through, you can add an extra board and bring the car up even higher. Check it several times. Make sure you're the right in the right spot. You can really damage the bottom of a car doing it improperly a little more. You always want to put a jack stand underneath the vehicle.
Uh It's very important to have that in a secure spot. You don't want to just get underneath the vehicle with your floor jack underneath it because it can slip off. They do fail. So the jack stand is much more secure. Good.
There, there you go. Well, now we've got one corner up. Perfect good shape. Nice and safe from here. We'll go over to the other side, use our jack lift that side being very careful that everything is uh still stable.
Go to that side, go to the back, it's all repetition, go around and every so often check the vehicle, shake it a little bit with no one under the car. If it's secure. You're good to go.
Unless you had wood, or race ramps on the passenger side, the jack is just not going to go under the car. You had a guy with his shoe holding the wood.. if U had another guy to hold wood on the passenger side, then it becomes a 3 man job!