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I own a 3 ton HF low profile. After jacking I use jack stands while keeping the floor jack snug on the side I'm under. If it's questionable I'll stack 6 X 6's in case of mechanical failure.
I won't risk it anymore. If it's that bad I pay someone.
I recently did some research on the best floor jacks and found that all chinese made floor jacks are not rebuildable and a single O-ring is the only thing preventing the jack from failing and dropping the load if that O-ring fails. The old jacks of yesteryear are good safe floor jacks, once they began manufacturing overseas is when the quality and safety took a dive.
Only a USA made jack is worth the money and can be trusted as an everyday use jack. They can be repaired if something fails. The Chinese made garbage is a purchase and replace item. Anything made by Hein-Werner or any jack that has been rebranded that is made by Hein-Werner is a quality jack. I think Lincoln was an old name that was made by Hein-Werner
I almost always agree with buying USA tools over foreign stuff, but all jacks suffer from the same safety concerns. One seal blows and the thing is coming down. ALL hydraulics should never be trusted to be under without a mechanical safety...whether is a floor jack, 2 or 4-post lift, a forklift, or a piece of equipment. The jack's job is to get what you are working on in the air....not to support it while up there. And at 5x the price of the "cheap" jacks, it's a hard pill to swallow for the average DIY homeowner.
I almost always agree with buying USA tools over foreign stuff, but all jacks suffer from the same safety concerns. One seal blows and the thing is coming down. ALL hydraulics should never be trusted to be under without a mechanical safety...whether is a floor jack, 2 or 4-post lift, a forklift, or a piece of equipment. The jack's job is to get what you are working on in the air....not to support it while up there. And at 5x the price of the "cheap" jacks, it's a hard pill to swallow for the average DIY homeowner.
I get that and agree with your points. However, all the cheap jacks I’ve had started leaking from day one and there was only one speed when lowering—fast!
I almost always agree with buying USA tools over foreign stuff, but all jacks suffer from the same safety concerns. One seal blows and the thing is coming down. ALL hydraulics should never be trusted to be under without a mechanical safety...whether is a floor jack, 2 or 4-post lift, a forklift, or a piece of equipment. The jack's job is to get what you are working on in the air....not to support it while up there. And at 5x the price of the "cheap" jacks, it's a hard pill to swallow for the average DIY homeowner.
I can't find the forum I was on about the hydraulic jack discussion I was reading. In a nutshell the American made jack had some type of fail safe. I don't know if there was any truth to it or not but from what I remember reading a seal could fail and the jack would still hold the load.
I can't recall how many $100 Chinese jacks I've purchased over the years that are no longer in service. At least with the American made jack it can be repaired instead of tossed, so in the long run it's money saved. The Chinese jacks are only designed to operate a few times a year, the USA jacks are designed for higher usage and will provide a longer service life.
I get that and agree with your points. However, all the cheap jacks I’ve had started leaking from day one and there was only one speed when lowering—fast!
Have you had one made in the last 5-10 years? They've gotten much better. Mine have been flawless. I've had more trouble out of my older USA Craftsman (leaking) than any other.
Originally Posted by dirthawg
I can't find the forum I was on about the hydraulic jack discussion I was reading. In a nutshell the American made jack had some type of fail safe. I don't know if there was any truth to it or not but from what I remember reading a seal could fail and the jack would still hold the load.
I can't recall how many $100 Chinese jacks I've purchased over the years that are no longer in service. At least with the American made jack it can be repaired instead of tossed, so in the long run it's money saved. The Chinese jacks are only designed to operate a few times a year, the USA jacks are designed for higher usage and will provide a longer service life.
The Hein-Werner jack posted earlier does not have a failsafe according to their website.
And please elaborate how the chinese jacks are only designed to operate a few times a year. If I use it 10x a month, do I have to throw it away?....or will it last 5 years if I only use it twice a year?
Sorry you had back luck with them...maybe try a different brand. 4+ years on mine and not a drop of oil on the floor. I can replace it 5x for what the HW costs, and pick one up same-day, any day of the week in town. If I get 8 years out of a jack, I'll be far too old to use one by the time I save money on a USA jack.
You get a scissor jack from an RV shop with a hex drive head. You stick your impact gun on it and pull the trigger. The scissor jack is infinitely lighter than a floor jack, and with a gun on it, it’s infinitely faster. Use cribbed 6x6 timber’s instead of jack stands. They’re infinitely more stable and can handle 10x the load of a normal jack stand.
Wood timbers crack and split in half following the grain lines, especially the fast growing and reasonably affordable species of lumber most commonly available today. Old growth, tight grained, sturdier timbers of yesteryear are much harder to come by, and when found, they are often dilapidated and compromised with age, dryrot, insect infestation, and other maladies that dead wood suffers during the decades past being harvested. I've seen heavy timber split apart along knots. Something to think about.
A cribbed network of stack timbers increases the foot print of support, and reduces the risk of relying on the grain integrity of any one timber, but then there is another risk... the time it takes to arrange and stack the crib once the truck is raised by the hydraulic (or scissor) jack. The jack has to hold up long enough for the network of timbers to be assembled at a suitable height to support the truck, and it can be quite a pain to get the truck at the right height to match the dimensions of the assemblage of timbers. Without additional shims of plywood, 2x4's, 1x4's, and similar smaller thickness of whatever wood scraps are handy... scraps that are often soft woods having unpredictable compressiblity, it might take even longer to get the right combination of stacked wood, that has to be less high than the range of the jack, as the jack must lift the truck higher than to top of the wood stack, in order to build the wood stack under the area that it is supposed to support.
In the brief as possible time interval that transpires while that all that building and positioning of wood is going on, what if the O ring seal in the hydraulic jack just so happens to choose to fail then? Of all times? Something else to think about.
Of course, the scissor jack eliminates the risk of hydraulic seal failure, but what kind of foot print does a scissor jack have for a base? Footprint is where a floor jack excels over a typical non-sledded bottle jack or scissor jack. Consider the ancient Egyptian pyramid principle. I once lifted the twin traction beam of a Ford E-Series front axle, using a bottle jack on the jack pin that Ford builds into the lower control arm for the purpose of raising and supporting the axle. The bottle jack was a typical hand holdable bottle jack, not built into a rolling sled base. The bottle jack was rated for the entire front GAWR of the E-Series cutaway, so the strength of the hydraulics was not the issue. The issue was the narrow base of the bottle jack, which ended up slipping off the jack pin that Ford provided for raising the axle. I wasn't harmed, as I had already prestaged jackstands in their intended positions (just not at the right height), and, I was using a long handle to operate the bottle jack, so I wasn't underneath the vehicle with the bottle jack tipped from the angular shift in weight.
A floor jack doesn't have this issue, as the front and rear wheels of the floor jack establishes a triangle between them and the lift cup. The footprint of a floorjack is HUGE when compared to the footprint of a bottle jack or scissor jack. Here is a BAL RV scissor jack...
Let's suppose the foot plate of this jack is 3" wide by 6" long. That's 18 square inches of foot print.
Now let's compare that to a typical floor jack that is 12" wide (wheel to wheel) by 36" long (wheel to wheel). That's 432 square inches of foot print.
I'd rather have a base that covered 432 square inches between contact points on the ground, versus only 18 square inches. 432 covers 24 times the ground than 18 does.
I'd also rather have a base that was impervious to the influence of pebbles and rocks underneath. A small footprint, made of a flat surface, could be canted by a pebble that broke off of the top surface of the asphalt as the jack was being shoved into position.. On the other hand a large footprint that was open in the center, and that was defined by four corners of support points that were themselves radiused (wheels), remains uninfluenced by the cragged surface of aged, unsealed asphalt where the fines and fillers have long ago washed away. Yet something else to think about.
Here is where I used two long frame jacks, one on each side of a truck, on an angled driveway, with the jacks oriented perpendicularly to the angle of slope, with two jackstands already in position standing by. The advantage that jackstands have over wood is their immediate deployability to the height needed, as well as their quicker height adjustability, in finer increments. The advantage of floor jacks over bottle jacks (that are not sledded like floor jacks), and in particular the advantage of long frame floor jacks, is the huge triangle of pyramid like support to the lifting action of the jack. The long frame also puts the jack handle outside the body, making the full arc of pumping range available. Many floor jacks (including mine shown below) also have a quick pump handle that is short enough to fit under the vehicle, to speed up raising the jack arm. Another feature to also consider when shopping for a floor jack.
Here is where I used two long frame jacks, one on each side of a truck, on an angled driveway, with the jacks oriented perpendicularly to the angle of slope, with two jackstands already in position standing by. The advantage that jackstands have over wood is their immediate deployability to the height needed, as well as their quicker height adjustability, in finer increments. The advantage of floor jacks over bottle jacks (that are not sledded like floor jacks), and in particular the advantage of long frame floor jacks, is the huge triangle of pyramid like support to the lifting action of the jack. The long frame also puts the jack handle outside the body, making the full arc of pumping range available. Many floor jacks (including mine shown below) also have a quick pump handle that is short enough to fit under the vehicle, to speed up raising the jack arm. Another feature to also consider when shopping for a floor jack.
And please elaborate how the chinese jacks are only designed to operate a few times a year. If I use it 10x a month, do I have to throw it away?....or will it last 5 years if I only use it twice a year?
MANUFACTURERS/IMPORTERS
This section has become quite confusing with several MANUFACTURER/IMPORTERS hoping to reduce costs by trying different countries for manufacturing and assembly and then with popular names being 'retired' then brought back into the market. It's a volatile situation out there, but here's what it looks like as of February, 2005...MILWAUKEE HYDRAULICS is and always has been American made.
US JACK is almost completely American made except for their newest short frame model (which has an American made frame and a Taiwanese hydraulic unit).
WALKER/LINCOLN - This one is REALLY CONFUSING, sit down and have a cup of herbal tea...
Walker was all American from the 40's through the 80's when it was bought by LINCOLN. LINCOLN kept it American up til the end of the 90's when they moved 99% of their production to China (one floor jack was still made in the USA). After a few years in China LINCOLN sold off their jack line to a company called CLORE who changed the name to MARQUETTE. They held the company for about a year and then in October of 2003 sold it to the big Chinese maker, SHINN FU. SHINN FU held it as it was for the better part of 2004 then surprised everybody by bringing back the old prestigious HEIN-WERNER name back (retired in the mid 90's) and began making the line in America again! The jacks are not at all the HEIN WERNER jacks of the 40's-through early 90's, they are purely the American made LINCOLN jacks from the 90's.
Meanwhile SHINN FU still markets the BLACKHAWK import BANNER jacks, made in China. And also the famous Blackhawk PORTO-POWER line of body shop jacking equipment, made in America. They also sell their own OMEGA Jacks made in China.
NORCO has a mixture of products ranging from Denmark, China, Taiwan and the USA. Their China products are made by the well respected YASUI company and by using Japanese seals have become very credible tools.
OTC has a couple of jacks made in America and the majority of their jacks made in Japan.
ZINKO jacks are made by the popular MASADA Company of Japan and have been around quite some time with good results - Pretty decent jacks for a reasonable price.
Recently 2 jack companies from Denmark have established operations in America, the AC and COMPAC lines. Both have been around for quite a while in Europe and offer extensive lines of fairly well made jacks.
Most everything else is made in China and designed for the Home Consumer Market, inexpensive, lower quality jacks not intended to be used more than a few times a year.
Have you had one made in the last 5-10 years? They've gotten much better. Mine have been flawless. I've had more trouble out of my older USA Craftsman (leaking) than any other.
No, I haven’t bought a Chinese floor jack in at least 20 years. It’s very possible they are better now. However, I did buy a Chinese bottle jack about two years ago and it leaked from day one, like I remember the old floor jacks doing.
Today I completed the replacement of an RV stabilizer jack that I had broke a few weeks ago. That type of jack is very susceptible to damage/failure if there is any sort of force exerted against it except in the vertical direction. I would have to be very desperate to use an RV stabilizer jack on anything other than a trailer that didn't have the tires well blocked to prevent movement.
I have much lower expectations of my stabilizer jacks now.
I have a Torin Big Red floor jack that takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to jack anything up. But it holds the load. It's also freaking heavy. I've had an Arcan 3-ton aluminum floor jack on my shopping list for a while. It's made in USA. Maybe I'll pull the trigger someday.
I've had an Arcan 3-ton aluminum floor jack on my shopping list for a while. It's made in USA. Maybe I'll pull the trigger someday.
I could swear that the Arcan jacks ive owned in the past, and the variety ive seen at Costco, Northern tool etc., are made in China. Do they have USA made versions?
Wood timbers crack and split in half following the grain lines, especially the fast growing and reasonably affordable species of lumber most commonly available today. Old growth, tight grained, sturdier timbers of yesteryear are much harder to come by, and when found, they are often dilapidated and compromised with age, dryrot, insect infestation, and other maladies that dead wood suffers during the decades past being harvested. I've seen heavy timber split apart along knots. Something to think about.
A cribbed network of stack timbers increases the foot print of support, and reduces the risk of relying on the grain integrity of any one timber, but then there is another risk... the time it takes to arrange and stack the crib once the truck is raised by the hydraulic (or scissor) jack. The jack has to hold up long enough for the network of timbers to be assembled at a suitable height to support the truck, and it can be quite a pain to get the truck at the right height to match the dimensions of the assemblage of timbers. Without additional shims of plywood, 2x4's, 1x4's, and similar smaller thickness of whatever wood scraps are handy... scraps that are often soft woods having unpredictable compressiblity, it might take even longer to get the right combination of stacked wood, that has to be less high than the range of the jack, as the jack must lift the truck higher than to top of the wood stack, in order to build the wood stack under the area that it is supposed to support.
In the brief as possible time interval that transpires while that all that building and positioning of wood is going on, what if the O ring seal in the hydraulic jack just so happens to choose to fail then? Of all times? Something else to think about.
Of course, the scissor jack eliminates the risk of hydraulic seal failure, but what kind of foot print does a scissor jack have for a base? Footprint is where a floor jack excels over a typical non-sledded bottle jack or scissor jack. Consider the ancient Egyptian pyramid principle. I once lifted the twin traction beam of a Ford E-Series front axle, using a bottle jack on the jack pin that Ford builds into the lower control arm for the purpose of raising and supporting the axle. The bottle jack was a typical hand holdable bottle jack, not built into a rolling sled base. The bottle jack was rated for the entire front GAWR of the E-Series cutaway, so the strength of the hydraulics was not the issue. The issue was the narrow base of the bottle jack, which ended up slipping off the jack pin that Ford provided for raising the axle. I wasn't harmed, as I had already prestaged jackstands in their intended positions (just not at the right height), and, I was using a long handle to operate the bottle jack, so I wasn't underneath the vehicle with the bottle jack tipped from the angular shift in weight.
A floor jack doesn't have this issue, as the front and rear wheels of the floor jack establishes a triangle between them and the lift cup. The footprint of a floorjack is HUGE when compared to the footprint of a bottle jack or scissor jack. Here is a BAL RV scissor jack...
Let's suppose the foot plate of this jack is 3" wide by 6" long. That's 18 square inches of foot print.
Now let's compare that to a typical floor jack that is 12" wide (wheel to wheel) by 36" long (wheel to wheel). That's 432 square inches of foot print.
I'd rather have a base that covered 432 square inches between contact points on the ground, versus only 18 square inches. 432 covers 24 times the ground than 18 does.
I'd also rather have a base that was impervious to the influence of pebbles and rocks underneath. A small footprint, made of a flat surface, could be canted by a pebble that broke off of the top surface of the asphalt as the jack was being shoved into position.. On the other hand a large footprint that was open in the center, and that was defined by four corners of support points that were themselves radiused (wheels), remains uninfluenced by the cragged surface of aged, unsealed asphalt where the fines and fillers have long ago washed away. Yet something else to think about.
Here is where I used two long frame jacks, one on each side of a truck, on an angled driveway, with the jacks oriented perpendicularly to the angle of slope, with two jackstands already in position standing by. The advantage that jackstands have over wood is their immediate deployability to the height needed, as well as their quicker height adjustability, in finer increments. The advantage of floor jacks over bottle jacks (that are not sledded like floor jacks), and in particular the advantage of long frame floor jacks, is the huge triangle of pyramid like support to the lifting action of the jack. The long frame also puts the jack handle outside the body, making the full arc of pumping range available. Many floor jacks (including mine shown below) also have a quick pump handle that is short enough to fit under the vehicle, to speed up raising the jack arm. Another feature to also consider when shopping for a floor jack.
you put a piece of wood under the scissor jack, and you don’t worry about the non-zero chance that the jack will fail in the picosecond longer it takes you to set the cribbing.
Please take this personally, but arguments like this are why engineering guidelines went from pocket references to five volume spiral bound sets that cause poor bookshelf reviews on IKEA forums.
I could swear that the Arcan jacks ive owned in the past, and the variety ive seen at Costco, Northern tool etc., are made in China. Do they have USA made versions?
When I posted that I had looked at one of first responses to, "Where is it made?" on Amazon and it said USA. Today I looked at the next two responses and they both say China. One of those responders is "Arcan Jack", so I'm going with made in China.
If all the floor jacks are made in China, I might as just go to my local Harbor Freight.
The Arcan Aluminum model is 40 lbs lighter than their steel model.
