25 x 25 garage / 2-post lift & garage door placement?

[Jeff G 78]

I haven't seen it come up yet, so I thought I'd remind you that you must have 6" thick concrete under your hoist. A friend of mine built his garage with a 6" floor and after many years when he finally got a hoist, the floor cracked within a few months. He took down the hoist and had a contractor come in to cut up the floor. They found that the original contractor had skimped and the concrete was only 4-5" thick rather than the 6" he called for. Once they repoured it to 6" he hasn't had any problems.

[jmortensen]

This is coming up more and more as the price of these things have come down to the stratisphere some of us can afford...

Just a comment for the guys interested in the sissors lift type, a buddy of mine sold me his first sissors lift and bought a second that will lift his car high enough so he can walk under it.

A scissor lift is fine until you want to change a clutch or work on the exhaust. You can walk under it, but you can't access the bottom of the car very well. Two post is the way to go for most of us I think.

[rdefabri]

The people I know that have them have the high lift tracks, so there's no interference.

[jmortensen]

The people I know that have them have the high lift tracks, so there's no interference.

Not familiar with high lift tracks. How does that work?

[EScanlon]

On the Garage Door:

Have the architect / specifier check into Vertical Lift Tracks for the doors. These are commonly used in Industrial applications, and have a corresponding Residential use, but my knowledge is from the Industrial side. These used to be called Guillotine tracks, because as the name implies the door comes straight down like a guillotine. Depending on the amount of room above the door, you can roll the door up with the minimum deviation from straight up, up to the "standard" home 90°.

This same method gets used for Walk-In Cooler/Freezer doors.

FWIW

E

[7T1240]

Hi Richard and all. I was pretty surprised to see this thread resurface. I began this thread (April '07) when I was in the planning stages for my garage. Things got rolling pretty good about mid-September of '07, and the building was pretty much roughed in by November of that year. Electrical was completed by about March '08. This spring and much of the summer was spent finishing the exterior and interior. Most recently, I powered up the hydronic floor heat about a week ago.

We ended up going with 26' x 30' dimensions. The door is an insulated 18' x 8'. Wall height was set at 10', with the ceiling height being about the same. Much like conedodger suggested, I poured a pit with buried conduit to fit a scissor lift. We also incorporated radiant floor heat in the concrete pad. I did use the SIP's panels alluded to earlier in the thread, and had R-48 blown into the attic. The building holds heat quite well.

Pictures as follows:

1. The house we tried to emulate the style of when designing the garage.

2. Garage mandoor, board and batten detail.

3. Arch top windows.

4. View from alley, garage door open. The pit for the scissor lift is currently covered by the reinforced plywood seen under the Nissan truck in this picture.

5. Hydronic heat system, circulates propylene glycol / water mixture through hot water tank and into pex tubing in the concrete slab.

Generally, I'm really happy with this building. Right now the Z is tucked in there with a '91 Miata, a '78 911SC, and a '96 Nissan truck. It's a bit tight, but I'm not complaining...just happy to have stewarded this project from planning to construction and near completion. Thanks to all of you who made suggestions here and elsewhere - many great suggestions were incorporated into the end result.

Gary S.

[Carl Beck]

A scissor lift is fine until you want to change a clutch or work on the exhaust. You can walk under it, but you can't access the bottom of the car very well.

Why is that ? It would seem, from the pictures that the two drive on ramps are not connected together - wouldn't that leave the entire undercarriage open to work on???

FWIW,

Carl B.

[rdefabri]

Not familiar with high lift tracks. How does that work?

Enrique pretty much explains it in his post. In my neighboorhood, which is a development, the builder put in these high lift tracks that basically go straight up until there is a small bit of clearance between ceiling / door / tracks. At that point, the tracks arch backward in traditional fashion, but they don't extend as far back as a traditional.

In my garage, I have one high lift door, one traditional lift door. The high lift is the door closest to where you enter / exit the house. This was due to the possibility of traditional tracks being too low and potentially harming the homeowner if not paying attention (e.g., you'd ram your head into the tracks). Not really a likely occurrence, given that my garage is really big, but since the house is elevated, I guess it's possible if you are really tall (I am not!).

7T1240 - nice job on that garage!

[jmortensen]

Enrique pretty much explains it in his post. In my neighboorhood, which is a development, the builder put in these high lift tracks that basically go straight up until there is a small bit of clearance between ceiling / door / tracks. At that point, the tracks arch backward in traditional fashion, but they don't extend as far back as a traditional.

Got it. I thought the high lift tracks had something to do with the scissor lift.

Why is that ? It would seem, from the pictures that the two drive on ramps are not connected together - wouldn't that leave the entire undercarriage open to work on???

By Rob's description this one is a bit bigger than your traditional scissor lift which lifts the car from the body between the wheels. The "normal" scissor lifts that I've used usually lift to about 4' and are fine for doing brakes and suspension and that type of thing, but aren't good for much else, because the lift mechanism is in the way of getting under the car, and it only lifts the car 4'.

If this is a drive on and you can walk underneath it, then it is less useful for suspension work because the car is still on it's wheels when it is lifted up in the air. Most of them have braces from side to side, I don't see that in the pictures, but even if they're not there the scissor part of the lift itself and the lack of room between the two tracks are going to be a limiting factor when you're trying to pull a transmission or a full exhaust system. You sometimes need to finagle a part around to get it out or you may need to get into a weird position to access a bolt, and 4 post lifts don't really allow for that.

Go check out 10 auto shops and you'll see the same thing everywhere: 2 post hoists all the way around, with the possible exception of one drive on 4 post which is undoubtedly an alignment rack. At least that's the way it was at almost every shop that I worked at. 2 post is really the way to go and allows for the most access to the underside of the car. The only thing it doesn't allow for is alignments and other things that you might do with the suspension loaded, setting corner weights or removing swaybar preload, etc. I worked at one Porsche shop where we had an alignment system that worked with the 2 post hoist: it had 4 stands which were set up under the wheels and had slip plates on all 4 corners to settle the suspension. You would think that it was the best of both worlds, but it was really impractical to set the stands perfectly level, just due to the imperfections in the floor and the fact that every car would get pulled onto the 2 post hoist in a different spot, meaning that the stands wouldn't end up in exactly the same spots on the floor every time. Still, for a home owner with one race car type of situation, that's probably the best solution IMO, and it wouldn't be too hard to build the stands.

[conedodger]

I only use mine for maintanance. You have to remember Jon, 3/4 of my "herd" is rear/mid engined and aircooled. The sissors lift works wonderfully for them. I bought my 240Z basically mechanically done. So, I don't really need to get at the transmission etc. If I did I can crawl into the sissors area. A bit creapy but the thing does have safety gaches to keep it from coming down on me.

All of that said, I would prefer a two or four post that I could lift one and park another under. In fact two would be perfect. But I am dealing with a 58 year old home and it would require pulling out the concrete and replacing it and raising the garage door. Too much bother.

Someone around the Z world dealt with garage doors a few years back. He bought my newly built engine and drove up to get it in a garage door installation truck.