Stef
Active Member
This spring when I did my seasonal maintenance on the S10, I decided that I was tired of lying on the concrete floor of my garage to work on my bike. I know a couple of people who bought HF lifts over the years and even with their less-than-stellar reputation, they were pleased with them. I watched a bunch of reviews on YouTube and came across one where it's owner replaced the OEM bottle jack and mechanism with an air/hydraulic jack and decided that I was going to make the same mod. There was a problem though. It looks like HF sells two different versions of the lift out there, and while they both function similarly, the mechanisms are very different. Different enough that the mod would not work with one of the two lifts. After a little research, I found out that the lift I wanted to use was model #69904.
Nobody within 200 miles had one in stock so I got to play a few weeks of phone tag with stores until I found one that had the lift in stock. I had several false alarms because for some stupid reason, the stores' inventory system can't seem to differentiate between the two different models. If either model was in inventory, a search for either SKU would report they had it. None of the employees I talked to realized that there were two different versions so I would have to ask someone to visually verify the SKU on the crate to make sure it was #69904 and not #68892. When I finally found one in Portland, and they verified it was the right model, I said screw it, asked them to hold it for me and headed South. A few hours later, I was home with the lift.
The next morning I took it out of the crate and after pumping on that foot pedal for the first and last time, had the lift in it's highest position. With the safety bar holding it in place, I gutted all the parts from the lift I would no longer need and went to work with the angle grinder. I cut off the mount for the old bottle jack, ground it flush, and repainted the frame. While the paint was drying, I stopped by my friend's shop and he welded a pipe to the bottom of the new air/hydraulic jack that would act as the new pivot point for the jack. After some layout and verifying the locations, I drilled holes for the rod that went through the pivot pipe and assembled it all. After a little tweaking with a die grinder and adjusting the length of the ram extension, it was done. Well, almost.
I needed to fabricobble a way to turn the release valve to lower the lift. I drilled through an old socket, pulled the pin from the release valve and put the socket over the release before reinstalling the pin, trapping the socket a universal socket and a t-handle through an existing hole in the frame finished it off.
It works great and I should have done it years ago
Nobody within 200 miles had one in stock so I got to play a few weeks of phone tag with stores until I found one that had the lift in stock. I had several false alarms because for some stupid reason, the stores' inventory system can't seem to differentiate between the two different models. If either model was in inventory, a search for either SKU would report they had it. None of the employees I talked to realized that there were two different versions so I would have to ask someone to visually verify the SKU on the crate to make sure it was #69904 and not #68892. When I finally found one in Portland, and they verified it was the right model, I said screw it, asked them to hold it for me and headed South. A few hours later, I was home with the lift.
The next morning I took it out of the crate and after pumping on that foot pedal for the first and last time, had the lift in it's highest position. With the safety bar holding it in place, I gutted all the parts from the lift I would no longer need and went to work with the angle grinder. I cut off the mount for the old bottle jack, ground it flush, and repainted the frame. While the paint was drying, I stopped by my friend's shop and he welded a pipe to the bottom of the new air/hydraulic jack that would act as the new pivot point for the jack. After some layout and verifying the locations, I drilled holes for the rod that went through the pivot pipe and assembled it all. After a little tweaking with a die grinder and adjusting the length of the ram extension, it was done. Well, almost.
I needed to fabricobble a way to turn the release valve to lower the lift. I drilled through an old socket, pulled the pin from the release valve and put the socket over the release before reinstalling the pin, trapping the socket a universal socket and a t-handle through an existing hole in the frame finished it off.
It works great and I should have done it years ago
