Car lift

Is your car lift carriage jerking, making noise or jamming when lowering? The most common cause is worn slider blocks - and in summer, when the heated-up column increases the clearances, the symptoms are at their worst. We show you how to check the carriage play in 5 minutes without taking the lift apart, how to recognise worn slider blocks, what the replacement looks like step by step, and when it pays to replace them preventively - before the column suffers.

Every mechanic knows the sight: a two-post lift with a car up top drops onto its safety latches because a cable on the car lift has snapped. The vehicle is stuck, the bay is dead, and you're losing time and money. The second, equally common case: the cable is due for preventive replacement, but the manufacturer disappeared years ago and the model is two decades old. In both situations one thing matters most — getting the right cable as fast as possible. Here's how to do it without hours of calling around suppliers.

In most cases you don't need to lubricate the steel cables in a two-post lift. If the cables work in dry conditions, with no standing water under the channel, they last up to 15 years with no maintenance at all. Lubrication only makes sense when the lift is connected at the bottom and the cables are in constant contact with moisture — and in that case you use a penetrating wire-rope lubricant, not ordinary machine grease.