I hesitated over mentioning this because it’s sure to result in an ass-load of “I knew it”, “I told you so”, etc. But for the benefit of those that follow, I decided to suck it up and address the issue.
What do you do when your lift, doesn’t?
One of the hydraulic rams on my fabulous Harbor Freight lift leaks. At first it was no big deal, it was just kinda “seeping” a bit. But Wed the car was up on the lift and I couldn’t get it off. I couldn’t raise the lift the inch necessary to let me disengage the safety lock. Then I looked into the fluid reservoir and it was nearly empty. Which is explained by the leaky ram.
This was Wed night so I had 20hrs before that car needed to go on to the trailer for today’s roadtrip to VIR.
So with my usual optimism I bought some more hydraulic fluid and poured it into the reservoir last night. Then I turned on the lift, it raised up a bit, but “uh oh”, fluid poured out of the problem ram. Not seeped, but poured. Moving like my VIR weekend depended on it I rapidly disengaged the safety lock and let the car down.
So now I’m figuring out my options. I knew when I bought it that the 90day warranty was worthless. It required that I send the 900lb beast back in the event of problems. And there was no way I was going to do that. The warranty expired last month.
I need to get the ram off of the lift and either get it replaced or repaired. But there’s a problem. It’s not clear how the ram comes off of the lift. I won’t know for sure until I jack up the lift and get underneath it, but it looks like the ram is permanently welded on. That would mean that I’d need to get someone who knew what they were doing to show me how to best cut it off such that it could be welded back on.
I’ve had good luck with HF stuff for years, but I lost the roll of the dice this time. Bummer.
Later edit. I just got off the phone with HF. They are sending me a new hydraulic ram under warranty. It’ll take a month or two to get it…the slow boat from China, but it’s darn cool of them. Also…this means that once I get the lift up in the air so I can see how the ram is attached, I’m going to find that it’s removable. Whew.