This.
I’ve seen stands and other automotive supports shattered made with cruddy cast iron processes.
As much as I hate the lift type we have, it’s well made and wouldn’t want myself under something with poor quality control.
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Everyone has a preference I am sure - even those that have never used a lift in a profession (but have watched a lot of on line videos)
My preference would be recessed scissor - simple yet very effective - for servicing every mechanical section of the vehicle, and extremely space saving & almost invisible when not in use. Plus no columns to avoid.
Plain Scissor is fine too, few if any holes to drill in the floor, barely takes up any room, all vehicles fully mechanically serviceable, no columns. (Note - the scissor I own at my home is NOT the same as what I would suggest for the Space-it is still the best $550 I spent on a piece of garage gear though.)
For a heavy duty post type lift - this one would be ideal with the double jointed arms (no idea on the cost of such a beast though)
http://www.nussbaum-usa.com/portfolio_item/hl-14000sst/
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I think for most members who use it, the auto life is an infrequently-utilized but high-impact resource. Meaning it’s very valuable even if infrequently used by a given member. As an example, a couple of years ago I was unable to use it because of a bay door issue. Instead, I was forced to rent a bay/lift and that cost me $300 - six months of dues.
I think the lift is incredibly valuable and arguing over 250 more square feet in what will be a 32000 square foot space is ridiculous. It’s 0.7% of the space.
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36,000 sf…
The arms are the big things I miss; the current lift is hard on pinch welds since the arms aren’t adjustable to hit the designated points that use a thicker steel, and instead many vehicles such as mine have to use a different point on the pinch that bends over time.
Re: The Jay Leno segment on wheel-lifts - They use these for the ground service equipment at Delta Airlines. At least one vehicle has fallen off one. Thankfully nobody was underneath it when it happened.
It was probably user-error but we need to count on having user-error regardless of the quality of our training classes.
I vote for as close to idiot-proof as possible.
I’d like to separate the “receiving” (and unloading) bay from the automotive bay.
Based on at least one serious near-accident, I think we would be safer if we didn’t have people pulling into the automotive bay to unload plywood or whatever while there are other people lying under their cars.
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I personally prefer the traditional Rotary/Bendpak 2-post/2-arm overhead sync lift that you find in most shops. Very versatile, relatively easy to use. The arms allow enough movement to pick up the correct lift points on the vast majority of passenger vehicles, while also stowing away neatly.
Scissor lifts and roll-ons are less than optimal in my opinion. I was very nearly unable to use the lift on my Focus because the pads aren’t long enough to pick up both jack points, and the car has side skirts that extend below the lift points, so the problem is even further exacerbated. I certainly won’t be trying it again for fear of damaging the car. And this is a stock hatchback. Not to mention, the width that the pads protrude inward restricts the type of work that can be done under the car. For example, the exhaust on my RX-7 can’t be accessed because the right-hand lift pad is in the way. That’s not a problem on a lift with articulated arms.
I cannot agree enough with this statement. I’ve been under a car when someone backed in to unload and came way too close for comfort before deciding they were ready to stop, close the bay door, and use auto as their unloading space. Didn’t even honk their horn on the way in. There are near-misses all the time thanks to people backing into the auto space to unload their plywood and other extraneous nonsense. If we get only one thing out of this expansion, it absolutely needs to be separation from the loading area.
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In the Miata world we use hockey pucks or hardwood blocks with slots in them to keep from crushing the pinch welds.
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We have had it actually happen to me. I was working on my truck and an SUV back in recklessly and hit my truck. I thought he had stopped and was just getting back under it when he hit. Knocked it off jack and stand. Separate areas would be great.
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So as previously discussed: it’s more an issue of clarifying whether the current lease prevents us from working on vehicles for an extended period of time, and if so, what the lease’s line is before they consider a vehicle being actively worked on “parked.” I’d like to see the wording, but frankly it seems rather unlikely that the lease would have a stated time limit on repair work – and if it does, it’d certainly be a useful number to know!
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Pretty sure at least one vehicle has fallen off of the sort of lift that we use, as well. And likely every other sort of lift under the sun. I wonder how many vehicles the Delta ground service guys look at in a day/month/year… then we’d know how much one vehicle coming off the lift would mean from a safety standpoint.
“As close to idiot-proof as possible” would close down 2/3 of the 'Space. “Relatively safe when proper precautions are taken by an awake, brain-functioning adult” is probably more our speed.
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Last one in my catching up, cuz it’s important:
I suggested a metric when I said that member usage data was a poor one to use for future expansion based on how poorly it fits current usage, if I recall – if we start from the assumption that our current living arrangement is actually reasonably workable, current usage would itself seem to be a good baseline metric for how to use the space. If we start with the idea that, with space more than doubling, every space allotment itself doubles, we can then tweak from there – say, electronics is smaller than it could be for the foot traffic and maybe could use a little more than that; wood shop is super spacious and they definitely need the room they have currently but maybe it only gets 80% more space; and then we can all have the knock-down-drag-out battle royale we all know will happen over what to do about storage in the space.
In fact – thinking about it, I don’t think current member usage data should necessarily even be a direct consideration at all, because it tells the wrong story. What you’d want to use is some combination of peak usage (as in, for what percentage of time are resources in that area fully saturated and unable to be used by any other member) and member demand, particular member demand at peak (because the line for 3D printers when they’re all taken, for example, is nearly always longer than the line for the HAAS or the Bridgeport or the woodshop planer when any of those is “all taken”).
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It does now, allowed 10 days.
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Perfect – now I know how long to not work on my transmission for! 
So seems like having a bay optionally available for a week-long “long project” for a fee is something that the lease would permit, then. (If auto gets more bays, that is – as someone else mentioned earlier, can’t really do that with two bays; I’d think four is the minimum number where that becomes viable.)
Really, the suggestion isn’t anything different than what we do now, particularly considering that we don’t actually have any stated limitation on time at all. It’s really just a fee we’re charging for the luxury of actually being able to leave the thing being worked on for a while and be able to get a night’s sleep/not play hooky from work/etc. Just as “abusable” as our current policy, sure, but then they’d at least have to pay for the privilege.
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Yes, BMW owners will probably suffer during the summer.
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Who are the lucky bastards that are only suffering during the summer?
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What is allowed for 10 days?
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Time for landlord to repair A/C units.
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slinkygn
So as previously discussed: it’s more an issue of clarifying whether the current lease prevents us from working on vehicles for an extended period of time, and if so, what the lease’s line is before they consider a vehicle being actively worked on “parked.” I’d like to see the wording, but frankly it seems rather unlikely that the lease would have a stated time limit on repair work – and if it does, it’d certainly be a useful number to know!Photomancer
It does now, allowed 10 days.