Blog 25th Jan 2026 – Raised Vehicle Wheel Lifts Many years ago, one of the problems I’d encountered when I first started working on my own Mazda (and my wifes Vauxhall) was that the front air dam on both vehicles were remarkably low. That meant that with the road wheels on the ground, I couldn’t get a jack under the front of the vehicle to lift them up. When we lived back in Surrey, I’d gotten round this by sourcing some scaffolding boards and making a wheel lift for two wheels - consisting of a pair of boards screwed together and cut with a 45-50° slope on the front. I’d drive the vehicle onto these boards to get a lift of around 76mm for either the front or the rear of the car, sufficient to get the jack underneath. Over the years these had been invaluable and were easy to store in the garage. They provided a quick, safe and reliable lift of 3” for either the front or the rear... but not both.
Wheel Lifts
I'm about to embark on a fairly extensive front/rear brake rebuild on my wifes car so it struck me that it might be useful to have a set of four of these lifts - so that I could lift all four wheels by around 3”. There was an additional alteration I’d long wanted to make to the original pair, which was to add tyre end stops for the boards... to prevent any risk of accidentally driving off the board, once on. That had never happened in the past but being honest, a couple of times it had been a little close. I wanted to make sure that risk was eliminated.
Anyway – last week I got in touch with a local scaffolder and offered cash to buy four 1mtr lengths of boards. I kept it easy, by offering to cut and collect the boards - so there was as little as possible for the scaffolder to worry about. I also explained that my wife did actually need the work done and I think he got the funny side of where I was, and agreed to help. You can see the results in the pic. Pete was generous by making sure I got good boards, with a deep circular grain perpendicular to the load. He had them cut and ready for me when I turned up, without me even needing to use the circular saw I'd brought for the job. Honestly, if I ever need scaffolding for my house (roof jobs or whatever), these folks PMA Scaffolding would be my first port of call. For this pair, I used more fixing screws than before, to better clamp the two boards together. But I also revisited the original boards so as to add the same additional structure – meaning that all four lifts are now engineered the same way These will work like a charm and they’ll be lovely and safe to use when getting the four vehicle wheels up onto stands. Yeah, thanks Pete and the best of luck with your project. Comment | Back to Quick Links...