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Killer Lifts

I

’ve been working around repair shop lifts most of my adult life and I still have a healthy respect for them. Just the thought of the car above suddenly falling and crushing me makes me cringe and sends shivers down my spine. 

 

While working at Don Lyon’s Custom Auto Restoration Shop in Lutz, Florida early in my career, I had a frightening experience with a rickety old hydraulic lift. Don, bless his soul –he drank himself to death, was too lazy (or drunk) to fix the hydraulic leak in the lift that caused it to run low on hydraulic fluid.

 

I’m not sure exactly sure how a lift works, but somehow air pressure forces hydraulic fluid into the huge piston that pushes the lift along with the car up into the air. The hydraulic leak somehow left a void in the system, a void that must have filled up with compressed air instead of hydraulic fluid.

 

Anyone knows that fluids, unlike air, can’t be compressed. And the compressed air void would make my lift suddenly drop two or three feet downward without warning. And I mean suddenly! Can you imagine how scary that was? That dropping lift—car and all—would clunk me on the head so hard that it would knock me to the ground and leave a big knot on my head!

 

Right away I got into the habit of propping up the lift with an old driveshaft. However, that didn’t stop the darn thing from shooting right up into the air. Nope! You see, when I would lower a car, I would first have to toggle the raise-lower control valve to raise the lift back up some. That’s how I was able to get the driveshaft out. Then I could lower the lift.

 

Sometimes when the lift was going upward, it would act as there was no air pressure. I mean, nothing would happen as I held the control valve in the UP position. I could hear the air hissing through the pipe but the lift wouldn’t budge.

 

Then, all of a sudden, the lift would shoot upward and make a loud bang as it reached the end of its travel. This upward force was so abrupt that it would actually launch the vehicle that was sitting atop of it into the air. You could see daylight between the vehicle and the arms of the lift.

Now THAT was really scary! Then the vehicle would drop back onto the lift with a loud thud. I would just cringe and grimace at the thought of the car bouncing off the lift and onto me! But, glory be, I never did see a vehicle fall off that lift. I nicknamed it “The Killer Lift.”

 

About a year later, I got a job as a Mercedes Benz tech working for Precision Motor Cars in Tampa. There were maybe 15 of us working there and we each had our own lift. I gotta say, there were some pretty strange politics going on behind the scenes and they hired and fired techs on a regular basis.

 

I was the new kid on the block—so to speak—and I did everything to mind my P’s and Q’s. I took my time and didn’t rush though any job, being extra careful not to leave any grease prints and to make sure the customer would be happy with the work I had done.

 

Since I was new to working at a dealership, I took many of my cues from the other techs by watching what they did. I also asked a lot of questions. To this day I can remember this one tech, Gary, who had curly blond hair and blue eyes and was probably the friendliest tech of the bunch.

 

Gary’s lift had a fault with it. It would slowly bleed down. Not fast like the ones at Don Lyons, but slow enough so that if you left a car up in the air on the lift overnight, it would be sitting on the shop floor by the next morning.

 

Gary knew about this problem, but he sometimes got distracted and forgot. He was installing an exhaust system on a sky-blue Mercedes 450 SEL. He placed a support stand under the rear muffler in order to hold it in place while he installed and aligned the rest of the exhaust system.

 

Gary somehow forgot about the lift’s problem and went home leaving the car up in the air with the stand still there under the rear. And as you would expect, the lift slowly bled down overnight. This ended up in having the rear of the car held up in the air by the stand while the front end of the car came down with the weight of the car crushing the front bumper against the concrete floor.

 

And that’s exactly how it looked when we walked into the shop the next morning. There, in all its glory, was that beautiful 450 almost standing on its nose. What a horrifying sight! As each of us showed up for work and walked in the back door of the shop, our jaws dropped and we just stood there and stared in horror and disbelief.

 

Apparently the management had a wild hair up their you-know-what about Gary as an employee. As I said before—some kind of politics was going on. When they saw the 450 on its nose, they suspected Gary had purposely done this. And, boy-oh-boy they were lying in wait to fire him as soon as he walked in.

 

We were all standing at our work benches and staring at the back door waiting for Gary to appear. Would he have a smirk on his face? Would he be angry? Or was it just an honest mistake? We watched intently to catch a look at his expression as he walked in the door.

 

Gary came in the door with two other techs. They all appeared to be in a jovial mood and were laughing about some kind of joke that one of them had been telling. Then, as they entered deeper into the shop, they froze in their steps. Their faces clearly showed the horror of what they saw—especially Gary’s face.

 

Needless to say, despite his protests that he didn’t intentionally leave the car to fall on its nose, he was fired on the spot. And, to this day, I still don’t understand how the management of that dealership could blame the tech on a problem with their own lift—especially when they knew full well about its tendency to leak down.

 

Years later while working at Jim Loose Imports in Silicone Valley, I did see a vehicle actually fall off a lift. It fell off the lift in the far corner of the shop. And that lift even had lifting arms with locking pins that held the arms in place under the car.

 

The techs working at Jim Loose would get lazy and not bother to set the pin to lock the lift’s swing arms in place. Well, I’m here to tell you that one day it caught up with them.

 

I was standing halfway across the shop when the car fell. I watched in horror as a Fiat 124 convertible fell right off the lift. It all happened like it was in slow motion. The swing arm that was holding up the right front of the car suddenly sprang loose from where it had been under the car and shot outward leaving the car with only three arms under it.

 

The swing arm made a loud bang when it hit the end of its outward travel, and the 124 started doing a slow roll over to the right. The right front wheel tucked under and the car rolled completely over in the air as it plummeted toward the floor—all in slow motion!

 

By the time it hit the concrete floor it had flipped completely over and landed on its convertible top. There was a deafening crash and I remember smoke coming out from under it. But it didn’t catch fire. It just lay there dead on the floor with its wheels sticking up in the air. Then there was a deafening silence.

 

Ever since then I have had a healthy respect for the safety devices built into the lifts. If the lift’s hydraulics were to fail, like those lifts at Don Lyons did, there are mechanical locking catches that will prevent the lift from coming down.

 

But then there is still the possibility of having a vehicle slip and fall off the lift. Last winter that’s exactly what happened. One of the repair shops in town didn’t have much work with the snow and all, and a buddy of the owner used the shop lift to work on his own vehicle.

 

Well, they were friends and, you know you sometimes bend the rules for your friends. The only problem was the vehicle wasn’t a car or truck that the lift is designed for. It was a Bobcat loader. You know the kind, it’s a little fella with just enough room inside for one person.

 

Well, they somehow managed to get the darn thing up onto the lift. I dunno how they did it. It must have been a real chore to get it up onto the lift because those Bobcats are so low to the ground. And then there are those tiny tires on them. Well, they somehow got the lift under it and the Bobcat was hoisted up in the air. The tech was under it, working on it when suddenly the Bobcat shifted and slid off the lift and fell right onto the tech crushing him. He was  killed instantly.

 

Last spring, it happened again. A tech was working under the front of a car at a Mobil Gas station in Warwick RI while another tech was rotating the rear tires. The car was about five feet up in the air when it started rocking on the lift after the tech at the back of the car removed a tire.

 

Seeing the car starting to seesaw, the tech at the back yelled at the other tech in the front of the car but it was too late. The car slipped forward off the lift and crushed the tech standing in front. Police investigators said the car had not been properly secured to the lift. Wrong. The car was set on the lift with too much weight toward the front of the lift.

 

These stories illustrate what I call being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And not only that, these are encounters with what I call “Killer Lifts.”

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