Made In The USA: EZ-Car-Lift

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Housekeeping: We will have the Made In the USA: Black Friday Omnibus Edition post on Thanksgiving morning. Until then, enjoy this one! — jb

I’ve been writing about American-made products for a couple of decades now. Most of the time, the pitch for said items equates to “You can get something that’s a little bit nicer, made by your neighbors, for a fairly steep bump in price.” Most of the time, that’s a reasonably compelling argument — or at least it is for me.

Today, however, we’re going to talk about a product that is

• demonstrably more functional than the foreign competition

• demonstrably more durable and longer-lasting than the foreign competition

• simpler and more reliable than the foreign competition

• while costing about the same money

So… welcome to the EZcarlift as seen above, lifting Danger Girl’s 30th Anniversary Edition Miata. If you buy one this week it will cost you $2,051. It’s most often shopped against the almost entirely Chinese Quick-Jack, which costs $1,800 for the basic model and $2,150 for the model that most closely matches the EZcarlift.

But wait, there’s more. The EZcarlift can be used to move cars in the air. It can be used with motorcycles. It can be used as a slide-in (from the side) or a drive-on platform. It can convert to an adjustable workbench. It lifts almost half again as high as the Quick-Jack.

Best of all, there’s no hydraulic fluid and no hydraulic pump, which is the bête noire of Quick-Jack use.

So how does it work, anyway?

getting higher than that one cokehead dude who raced a volvo in Speedvision

Let’s start by talking about how the Quick-Jack works, although many of you will already know from your experience with the God-dammed things trackside. The Quick-Jack consists of two metal-tube parallelograms that you lay flat and slide under the rockers of your car. You then start a hydraulic pump that operates hydraulic rams in both of the parallelograms, raising them from flat to roughly square.

Once you’re pumped all the way up, you insert a metal pin to hold it in place. Quick-Jacks work reasonably well trackside and in home garages, but they’re subject to the following issues:

• They leak. At the pump, or at a fitting, or in the middle of a hose. Most of the Quick-Jacks that I see in use by race teams leak to some extent. It can’t be helped. You’re popping Chinese hydraulic connectors on and off, again and again. So they lift slowly, or they sag, or the pump has to run longer than it should.

• The locking system is kinda flimsy and it only works at three or four set heights.

• The entire setup is not that stable; it’s easy to imagine pushing a car right off a set of Quick-Jacks, although I’ve yet to see it actually happen. You have to be careful. Enduro teams don’t enjoy that aspect of it.

• The whole setup just looks, feels, and works cheap.

• If the pump fails, you’re just carrying dead weight in your truck.

That’s the Quick-Jack. How does the EZcarlift work? Mechanically. It consists of two scissor-lift platforms, weighing 60-some pounds each. You connect the two platforms with sliding crossbeams, one of which has a torsion bar. When they’re connected, you use a drill to spin a 5/8” socket which in turn operates screw drives in the mechanical scissor-lifts together, lifting the car up.

The EZcarlift is completely stable and fixed whether its two inches off the ground or all the way up to the max height of 26 inches, because the screw drive is perpendicular to the scissor lifts. So when you stop turning the screw drives, it’s static.

The preferred way to run the EZcarlift is via a corded drill, which can raise a car in about thirty seconds. Don’t have one? A cordless one will do it slower — although if you have something like an M18 Milwaukee, that’s not necessarily much slower. Don’t have a cordless drill? You can do it with a ratchet wrench and ten minutes’ worth of patient effort.

In other words, there is no cord or AC power required to use it, at any time. So you don’t need a generator in the field, you don’t need to run a long power cord, and you don’t have to run the power cord and the hydraulic hoses.

using the AI erase to get rid of my Tractor Supply chicken statute. what, you don’t believe me?

The whole setup is insanely robust. It doesn’t scratch or dent cars. The fellow who makes it rates it at 4,400 pounds — but if you need to do more than that, talk to him. There’s a caster kit for people who want to raise the car up a bit and roll it around their garage. It’s a really neat piece of equipment, made in the United States by a human being who answers the phone and really cares about his product.

Now for the drawbacks. You need to be a little stout to carry it around and assemble it by yourself, but I’ve seen a team of two people drag it out of a truck and have a car in the air by the time a five-minute timer beeps. The EZcarlift is rugged but it does contain a gearbox and screw drive, so it should be stored inside, kept clean, and periodically oiled. It takes up a little more room in a truck or trailer than the equivalent Quick-Jack.

damn it, there’s the massive cock again, right behind the old man in the fancy “work” pants

The EZcarlift saved a big part of our final 2024-season race when we had to drop and fix the transmission in Danger Girl’s race car between qualifying and race time. As you can see in the goofy-ass photo, we were able to operate it on soaked paddock grass with a pair of boards. Don’t try that with a Quick-Jack, which doesn’t have the requisite lateral stability.

Alright, this is starting to sound like an advertisement, but I don’t really care. This is a best-of-breed product. It’s priced fairly, it works great, and it’s made start to finish in the United States. It’s so easy to use that I find myself using it instead of the Rotary two-post in my shop when the car in question is too nice to risk rocker-seam damage from the Rotary’s metal pads.

The EZcarlift is recommended without reservation. I’m a satisfied customer. You are likely to be as well.