Please show me where the floor jack suppose to go!

When I got my '04 I bought a low profile floor jack. BARELY fit under the car to hit the front lifting point. And yes the first several stokes on the handle were short since I needed to go in angled from the front, not the side. Since I think the Prime is lower it may not fit at all.

The front point was more obvious on the Gen II since there was much less in the way of underbody shields but even then some people sprayed orange paint on the jacking point so it was easy to see without getting down on your belly. Could be a good thing to do on the Prime since it is not a clearly obvious shaped metal location.

 

Next time it is up on a lift. Or take it to a roadside inspection station that has a pit
Or maybe jack one side and put in a jack stand, do the same on the other side, suck it in and slide under!

 

Jack it up and settle it on safety stands, roll out the jack. That said, I wouldn't bother painting it.

I think you're just joshing, but just in case: you'd never want to crawl under there with just a floor jack holding it up.

 

Figure out where it goes, put paint lines at the rear of the front tires on the garage floor and U shaped paint lines for the rear and sides of the jack

Where is the jacking point for the pallet forks on my tractor? That would be even faster than a floor jack.

 

I could not get my low profile floor jack far enough under the side of the Gen II's to get it under the front jacking spot. You'ld probably have to run it up some ramps to get the jack under the side. Easy to run the jack up from the rear to get the rear jacking "tower".

 

It's not that hard.

Throw a piece of carpet down, lie on it, slide a pit lamp under and roll the floor jack in, around the middle. Then check the Owner's Manual pictures of the jacking point, it's just beyond the plastic zone, in sturdy metal, and there's a big bolt in a depression just beyond it.

 

It's interesting that in the video provided by @Mendel Leisk in post #4, the lifting pads on the hoist are not at the places shown in the manual for the scissors jack or the floor jack. I wonder ... if you install a large enough lifting surface on the floor jack, would that open up more possibilities for lift points?

 

I don't use the scissor jack locations (on my 3rd gen) for safety stands. If you put the scissor jack in position and start it up, you'll see it's not actually bearing on the knife edge, rather on the body behind it. And it's barely capable, starts to dimple in, in my experience, and that was on a back corner.

I put safety stands in further, four points I worked out by trial and error, and some info about second gen, by Hobbit if I recall correctly.

 

I rotated the tires on the Prime today since Toyota Care expired. I spent 15 minutes looking under the Prime with a flash light and my cell phone camera trying to locate the sturdy metal cross member that is shown in the pathetic illustration in the manual and which wasn’t visible from the photos earlier in this thread (the one taken while on the dealer’s lift). Has anyone found the location of this cross member and taken a photo of it? All I saw was the flimsy piece of metal which was in the earlier photo. I didn’t want to win a Darwin Award by smashing the floor Jack through that point if it’s not reinforced on its opposite side.

Fortunately I have two floor jacks so I ended up lifting one side of the car, swapping the tires, then doing the same on the other side. I rather would have done the tire rotation with all four corners on jack stands.

 

@jerrymildred is one 4th gen owner who's persevered, and he resorted to building low-rise ramps for the front wheels (3" IIRC), so that once the jack was rolled under as far as the front jacking point, he had (barely) enough clearance for the jack handle movement.

I believe it's roughly inline with the front wheels? That's about 4~5 feet back from the front bumper.

Addendum: looking back through the postings, did you see the pic in post #4?

 

We developed this jacking plate to fit the center hole in the rear control arm. It allows one rear wheel to be raised no much than about two inches for exceptionally safe tire changing without full expansion of the rear spring as would happened if the center rear jacking point is used. That's a really inexpensive $33 Walmart 2 ton floor jack.

 

I looked at the photo in post #25 since that was a of a Prime. The plate in the photo doesn’t appear thick enough to be load bearing. Perhaps the cross member is on the other side of that plate, but I didn’t see any obvious indication of X marks the spot to place the jack.

I considered driving up onto a rough cut 2x12 that I had lying around but that would have meant chopping that piece of lumber in half to get both front tires off the garage floor. I hadn’t planned to do woodworking and auto maintenance on the same day.

 

Nice to see something with a Made in the USA label!!!

Out of curiosity what is the drawback for unloading the rear coil springs the rear center jack point is used?

 

That one shows the same spot.

Whinge whinge

 

There should be no problem, since the spring fully supports the full weight of the rear corner of the car even with a moving load. It is much less when the car is stationary.