Hydraulic Floor Jacks

[Crow Horse]

Addendum to my HF floor jack conversion - Just before I started the conversion I retired from working in a large metal fabrication shop. Bad timing but it worked out in the end. The only item that I had my former co-workers do for me was to cut the 3/8" aluminum flat stock to size. Other than that, using the Pro Eagle parts was pretty easy although expensive. I don't have a lathe (not yet but working on it) and had to use their already made axles. If you had a lathe, you could turn your own axles and that would cut some of the cost. Some have suggested that I could have used HF wheels but the Pro Eagle wheels are proven and I'm a firm believer in that safety is an arena where one shouldn't economize.

I've used the converted jack quite a bit over the past year and it works great. Pulling it over my gravel driveway is almost effortless unlike dragging my steel floor jack. That was almost impossible.

I removed the original handle because it was located poorly for balance and it interfered with the front wheels. The handles I used I found on Ebay. The original 8.8 hardware was replaced with longer 12.9 fasteners.

Pics during the conversion for the rear wheels.....

 

[Flyinfool]

A question on the rapid pump jacks. In all of the vids they always show the jack lifting a small car that probably does not weigh more than 2000 lbs and they are usually lifting near one tire so they may be actually jacking up less than 1000. How is it pumping up something that is near the weight limit of the jack? My truck weighs ~7000 lbs with a half tank of gas according to the drive on scale at the local gravel yard. So that means that if lifting one side I am lifting ~3500 lbs. The fewer the pumps needed the more force needed on the pump handle. I don't want to be like a racing jack where you see the jack man with both feet off the ground throwing himself at the jack handle to raise the vehicle.

My thoughts seemed to follow yours. I looked at a bunch of different wheels and decided that for safety the Eagle pro parts are the way to go. I am on the list for them to email me once they are back in stock. guessing from the pics the axle is from Ø3/4 stock so it looks like just the material will cost half the price of one of their axles. So just getting their axles may be worth it.

 

[Crow Horse]

I can't answer your question completely, but the HF aluminum rapid pump floor jack does require a little more effort. My truck in only 4500#'s so it doesn't really compare to your 7000#'s. Assuming the required effort isn't that much more, the mobility factor outweighs the required increase in effort to lift.

 

[C-Bag]

The puck should always be vulcanized rubber, inside and out. If it's synthetic, I don't know how it would behave, so I just assume they are all the same. When used on ice, they are frozen before games but that is simply to reduce bounces. Here is a picture of the puck on my harbor freight jack. It is slightly smaller, but sufficient.

From the looks of it, I might need to replace it, finally.

Sent from my SM-T500 using Tapatalk

Whoda thunk this thread would have taken this detour but as usual I’m glad it did as I’d never learned about hockey pucks! I got my pucks in the mail and finally got to use one for one of my present projects. I’m doing some sheetmetal work and the pucks are working perfectly. It’s funny this came along just as I was wondering where I could get a big piece of rubber to form metal on.
Thanks Silverhawk!