Car Stands

brought to you by: Dave Williams
This page: www.bacomatic.org/~dw/tool/cstand/cstand.htm
Main page: http://www.bacomatic.org/~dw/index.htm
Last Updated: 25 Aug 2008

Author: Dave Williams; dlwilliams=aristotle=net

This is a set of wheel stands I built to hold cars up while working on them. I had been using concrete blocks, which people had repeatedly warned was unsafe. I figured concrete was good in compression, and stood in normal orientation with the hole up they should be plenty strong, but then a message came by on the old Fordnatics mailing list. One of the members' father had been hospitalized after a cinder block broke while he was under the car. Granted, it was a cinder block instead of concrete, and it turned out he'd laid it on its side instead of upright, but I went right outside and built these.

I had some short pieces of 2x lumber on hand, so that's what I used. The boxes are wide enough and tall enough for my vehicles. The 2x2 stops help keep a tire from rolling off. The boards on the bottom give a little extra height.

I drilled pilot holes, used 5" wood screws, and liberal amounts of carpenter's glue. The color differences are because I used all the scrap wood I had on hand, regular, treated, pine, or fir.

Half a dozen coats of polyurethane clear let me just wipe off any oil that gets on them, and water can't soak in.

I bought a set of metal handles from the hardware store, to pick them up and carry them, but the handles are still in the cabinet. [sigh] Mostly, the stands stay stacked on top of each other when not in use, and you can carry two of them easily without the handles, and adding handles wouldn't let you carry more than two anyway.