The Web Page of Kristopher Linquist

Sept 14, 2004

After one season of changing tires at the autocross with the $20 Harbor-Freight jack pictured below... It's time to get serious. This little jack might work fine for routine maintenance in your garage, but when you need to change all four tires - TWICE - fairly quickly in a day, it's important not to rely on something so small.

Here are the three candidates:

Harbor Freight item 40105 (US General)
Sears (Craftsman) 4000lb
Harbor Freight item 36119 (Central Hydraulic)

First of all, here is a picture of the three jacks beside each other:

The $20 jack was thrown into the mix for mostly humorous reasons. Most of the review will compare these two larger floor jacks.

Lets look at all of their specs:

Now, for the important stuff. After bringing the HF and the Craftsman jack home and following the directions to bleed the hydraulic system, I experienced fairly poor performance from both. I went down to my local auto parts store and bought a bottle of hydraulic jack oil and topped both jacks off - they were both fairly low. After doing this and bleeding the system again, performance was up to what I expected.

The craftsman definitely feels more solid. I suppose the size and weight of the unit has a lot to do with that. As you can see, the jack pads on both jacks are vitually the same size.

Neither jack provided enough leverage to jack up my car's front OR rear center jack point. On the rear, I only had a few degrees of leverage with both jacks. On the craftsman jack, these few degrees were not enough to move the jack pad at all. On the HF jack, it would move the jack pad up, but it was not enough to lift the car. After taking the jack out from under the car, I realized that about another 1/4 inch of clearance would be enough to jack up the rear of my car.

The HF jack can jack up the side of my car with 4 pumps while it takes 5 with the Craftsman. Of course, physics tells us that it takes more force with less pumps. This is definitely the case. Not a big deal for me, I simply use my body weight to press the lever down.

Which jack am I going to keep? The Harbor Freight. This is for two major reasons: (Less weight, ability to jack up with less degrees of movement from bottom leverage point) and one minor reason: (shorter footprint). If my car was two inches higher, I probably wouldn't have noticed the degrees of movement issue and would have kept the craftsman for the longer warranty.