Not every vehicle lift is the same, so it’s important to read the manual and familiarize yourself with everything you need to know about the lift. With each lift being different, each lift will have different capacity restrictions. The capacity or weight limit is important as it will cause stress to your vehicle lift if you exceed the capacity, and potentially cause it to break, possibly hurting someone and damaging the vehicle.
ALI Certifications
To maximize your automotive lift safety, consider purchasing ALI Certified lifts. The certification ensures that the safety standards for vehicle lifts in the U.S. are met. According to the Automotive Lift Institute, this testing covers the structural integrity, proper control functions, and overloading the lift beyond its rated capacity to ensure that the lift safely lives up to capacity claims without bending or breaking.
The certification helps to promote the safe design, construction, installation, inspection, and use of automotive lifts. Currently, the program certifies seven commonly used lifts in the automotive field:
- Two-post Surface Mounted lifts
- Multi-Post Runway lifts
- Drive-On Parallelogram lifts
- Scissors lifts
- In-Ground lifts
- Wheel Engaging Mobile Column lifts
- Low/Mid-rise Frame lifts
Knowing how to operates lifts properly can reduce accidents significantly, so make sure inexperienced technicians are properly trained in safe operations of lifts. When you’re a technician who relies on an automotive lift every day for your job, you depend on your safety. As a shop owner, you want to ensure your technicians are safe, and that your business has the proper equipment that performs well. With a lot riding on the performance of your automotive lifts, it’s important to understand them, take care of them, and respect them!
