How to jack up a Jeep with 33s

I have 33s on my CJ and I don't trust the high lift. I only use it when I have to. Go to the auto parts store and get a rolling floor jack and you may need one called an SUV jack that will get the height that you need. Jack it on the frame between the wheels and use jack stands once you have it up so you don't get killed while you're working on it.

Jack stands are a requirement. I saw this movie on TV once in which this bitch (I wouldn't normally say that here, but she was) walked into a garage where some guy was working under his car and twisted the handle on his floor jack, releasing the car. Not pretty!

A high lift jack is good for raising a barn to beef up the footing or something like that.

There is no safe way to use one on a Jeep.

I carry a small hydraulic floor jack that fits perfectly behind the passenger seat and use the spring plates as jacking points.

Mike

86/00 CJ7 Laredo, 33x9.5 BFG Muds, 'glass nose to tail in '00 88 Cherokee 235 BFG AT's

snipped-for-privacy@columbus.rr.com wrote:

I can vouch for this. I lifted a small barn (well actually a shed) with a high lift jack and it worked great. ;o)

Earle

That's true as far as it goes. However, it's also one of the most useful tools you can carry with you off road. It can be used as a winch, a jack, a clamp, a jaws of life, a tie rod straightener, a tire bead breaker... Just don't use it as a jack in the garage when you're working on your vehicle. Use a floor jack and jack stands.

Hi TJim,

I agree with you totally... a must for trail rides. Just last Saturday a member sheared off a valve stem. We used the hi-lift jack to break the tire down and install another stem. Hi-lift... marvelous invention, but can be dangerous if used improperly.

-- JimG

80' CJ-7, 258 CID 35" BFG MT's on 15x10 Centerlines 4.56 D30-D44 SOA D300 w/4:1 & Currie twin sticks Warn 8000i w/dual batteries LockRight F&R

use high lift for barns, trees, and offroad use ONLY (probably ok to beat up drug dealers with, but haven't tried it) the best bet is a decent floor jack or a bottle jack under your frame rails.

i bought my 93 yj 2 years ago and it had as a jack some toyota scissor jack which even at full extension doesn't even touch my frame! funny.

I used my Hi Lift exactly ONCE to lift the YJ, during which it decide to take a dramatic jump to the right, almost through the garage wall....never again. It is indeed great for nearly everything you can imagine besides raising the Jeep. FWIW, I kept the old stock scissor jack under the hood and it's still got enough travel to lift the wheels off the ground if placed under the spring plates.

David, my Hi-Lift only gets used in a dire emergency when nothing else will work. Not only that, I can (and do) rotate all five of my tires using a floor jack and four floor stands much faster than you can with that unstable and unsafe Hi-Lift. ;)

Jerry

wall....never

Well ya Jerry, I'm not saying that I 'like' using the Hi Lift, which is why I mentioned that I'd be looking for a way to use my standard hydraulic for the tire rotations. Just saying that a Hi Lift isn't

*that* bad is all hehehehe. :-)

Dave

For some reason, there seems to be quite a few people around here that believe that the Hi Lift jacks are unacceptable from a danger standpoint for use in changing a tire... The cars that I grew up with all had jacks similar to the Hi Lift type and although you probably had to be a little more careful with them, it wasn't a big deal to change a flat with them... Of course, back then, the only other choices were the 'bottle' hydraulic jacks and the rolling hydraulic floor jacks... The 'bottle' jacks were too slow to raise the vehicle and the rolling floor jacks were so large that they were only for garage use... I've changed *a lot* of tires with the Hi Lift type jack since back in those days, I was so cheap (back in the 'poor student days') that I didn't get a new tire until the previous one had catastrophically gone flat... The main things that you need to remember are that you should be very careful that the jack is lifting straight up such that there won't be a tendency for it to slide sidewards and you should chock your wheels and use jack stands so that the weight is supported by the jack for the least amount of time...

I'm old enough that my first 4-5 cars had that kind of jack as standard equipment. Big differences though between those jacks and how they were used and Hi-Lifts and our Jeeps. First of all, those jacks were not the 48" or 60" monster Hi-Lifts we use... they were maybe 36" at the tallest. Second, suspensions of our old cars that came with that kind of jack were fairly stiff and inflexible so jacking a vehicle up by the bumper was no big deal, since the tire started up off the ground within a few inches of lifting the bumper up. So those kinds of jacks, even though they were absolutely unstable even then, were not nearly as unstable in their typical lifting situations as our Jeeps are on 48" jacks.

And though it's been enough years that you and I might tend to forget these things, I definitely remember being warned MANY times by my dad, my uncle, and my dad's cousins of how dangerous those jacks were even back then. So it's not like the jacks you remember were safe even back then... because I remember VIVIDLY the safety lectures I got on them when I was a young new driver in the early sixties. So really, nothing has changed... we're still warning people about the dangers of this kind of jack today, JUST LIKE we did with the smaller jacks that came standard in our cars many years ago.

And if I forgot to mention this... the factory hydraulic jack works just fine for 33" tires. Heck, it works just fine with my 35" tires and I know for a fact that it works with 37" tires, I've seen the factory jack change

37" tires on the trail at least a few times.

Jerry

I haven't used a 60" Hi-Lift, but I've used a 48" one to change a flat on a

3/4 ton pickup... It didn't seem that much different than the ones that we used back on the old cars...

I'm not saying that the Hi-Lift type jacks are *safe*... In fact, probably no type of jack is truly *safe*, but the risks can be understood and mitigated... It's like when the battery is dead on my plane -- I'll chock the wheels and hand-prop it instead of spending the time charging the battery or the inconvenience of jump starting it... If you know how to do it and are aware of the dangers, you can minimize them...

Factory hydraulic jack? I don't think that I've seen a hydraulic jack from the factory on any vehicles... Or at least none of the vehicles that I've ever had to change flats on... The two main designs that I've seen are the scissor type with a pole that you crank in order to turn a screw that expands the scissor mechanism and one that looks like a bottle jack, but is instead has a gear mechanism that you crank with a pole to raise and lower the jack... I suspect that they do this in order to save weight and because they are cheaper (probably more the latter)...

I have a Hi Lift mounted on a Durango rear bumper and tire carrier. I've many times thought I'd stop carrying it, only to decide "yeah, and the next outing will be the time you need it!" Kinda like the winch that gets used just a few times per year.

On the subject of jacks, anyone see the article on CNN where the kid in Utah rolled his Jeep, got his leg trapped under the roll bar and used the jack to lift the thing off his leg? Of course that raises a couple of points: where was the seat belt and why was he wheeling alone??

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 22:30:37 UTC "MudPuppy1976

What timing... are you sure that wasn't someone from this thread trying to prove a point?

JimG