Four Post Lift; Assembly

We are building a four post lift, Dannmar D-7, from Garage Equipment Supply (GES USA). It is the Official Lift for GoodGuys. We have owned a couple of lifts before but always had them assembled. This is our first lift build. It was a little intimidating at first but turned out to not be such a big job after all. One thing to keep in mind, you are going to be standing under this lift with your prized car on it when you are done so check everything three times and don’t leave anything loose. We had two guys during most of the assembly most and my wife helped on a couple of steps adding a third set of hands.

The Cherry picker was a big help but there were times that raw brute manpower was the only option. One such point was putting the cross members on the end posts. The Cherry picker can hold it up close to the top but its reach was not great enough to lift it over the top of the columns. We  just had to grab it, lift and put it into place.

You can read in more detail about the build and the various steps on our Projects Page. We also have a lot more photos and comments on the build on that page.

This project will take you all of a day depending on how many people you have and how many breaks you take. Our assembly took a little longer. We had a problem.

Unfortunately, when we got to the point where its time to start up the pump and run the lift up and down to fill the hydraulic system with fluid ours just kept blowing circuit breakers. The lights would dim like in the movies when the “big house” fries a bad guy in the electric chair. I just happened to have an electrician here doing some other work and he checked everything out with the shop’s electrical system. We soon agreed that the pump was the problem.

I placed a phone call to GES and had a 60 second phone call with a tech guy and he said it sounds like a bad pump. He looked up my invoice and said he would ship out a new pump and I should have it in 24 hours! I really didn’t believe him but said ok. This pump and fluid reservoir is large and heavy (read expensive to ship). It had to go from Southern California to Middle Tennessee overnight. What do you think that costs?

Sure enough, less than 24 hours later FedEx had it on my door step. I am impressed. I can not remember the last time that anyone provided that kind of customer service. First there was no hesitation on their end; they didn’t try to wiggle out of responsibility; didn’t try to blame me; they knew right away it was their pump and said so. Then they could have taken the less expensive route to ship the pump and send it ground but they didn’t. Having a quality product is important but customer service is also vital for a business to be successful. Believe me, I won’t hesitate to purchase anything else from them; GES stands behind their products.

We will be giving you a complete product review on this 4 post lift in the near future after we have had an opportunity to use it and see how well it functions and meets our needs. You can read our review on our Product Review pages when it is posted.