What ramps or jacks are you using?

I think you are going to have clearance issues driving up those ramps.

SM-G781V ?

 

yep, angle too steep - air dam wont clear. I use the plastic rhino ramps. They're not tall but enough to do an oil change or you can get a jack all the way back to the proper jacking point.

hope this helps....

 

They can be used by placing a piece of 150 mm x 50 mm timber that is 400 mm long on the floor in front of the ramp.

 

Look to the Chinese sites you can get some pretty nice table lift looking things like they had at the old garage or dad went to You pull the car over the little hump on the concrete and this thing is laying on it looks like a table that's kind of flat with 35° angle ends on it. Then you get out and it's plugged into a 110 outlet and you move the little black knob and the table starts to raise under the rocker panels and it'll pick the car up he'd be surprised enough so you can roll the creeper under there with you almost sitting up and the new ones have the center of the table cut out so you can work on parts of the car that used to have a solid piece of metal there these used to be used for tire work but now the Chinese have them for you'd be shocked man I got to set one time for $180 brand new like the guy bought the jacks and the lips on hoovies garage if you watch that

 

These are the safety stand locations I'm using on our gen 3, and I believe the gen 2 underbody structure is quite similar.



I used the scissor jack support points for safety stands ONCE, and swore never again:

They're designed expressly for the scissor jack. If you place the scissor jack at those locations, and raise the car slightly, you'll see it the scissor jack seat is just cupping around the crimped sheet metal edge at the bottom, and actually bearing on the car body slightly inboard. I used the scissor jack on a rear corner once, for a flat tire, and saw after that the actual bearing point had been dimpled in slightly. And that's with the lighter, rear of car.

So far the above discussion has been about ramps. As far as the first link you provided, those do not look suitable, very steep, and widely spaced, more for a large truck.

Regarding floor jacks, any half decent 3 ton jack will be suitable. One issue though: I believe with gen 2 the front jacking point is way back, about inline with the front wheels? In that case you will likely need some sort of low-rise ramps, just to roll the floor jack in far enough, and have enough clearance that you can start the jack handle going up and down, not just banging uselessly on the underside of car. That can be problematic with the current gen of of floor jacks, which see to need more head room above, for the jack handle to be effective.

I'm using a 3-ton made in China, purchased Boxing Day 2005, for $69 CDN. We recently bought a new one for my son, another brand, and had to return it, due to the aforementioned jack handle issue. Plus it had a super-strong spring forcing the handle upwards. And it proved way too easy for the handle to pull out. That happened when it was under the car and raised: handle pulled out, socket snapped to an upright position, and then the trick was to get the damn thing back down and handle resinstalled. Without getting crushed...

Anyway, pic of my arsenal :



^ There's 4 each of the 3 ton and 6 ton safety stands, and 4 of the home made ramps. The various shims are for when I need to minor adjustments under the safety stands, typically when using 4 safety stands, due to the slab being not quite planar. The stump in background is my "insurance", whenever practical I push it under a the car, before I get under...

The jack is a 3-ton Samona brand, presumably made in China. It's handle starts pumping when it's barely above horizontal (which you really need with gen 2 front jacking point), and I've never had any problems with it. Again, $69 CDN on a Boxing Day sale, in 2005.

The black things are heavy rubber wheel chocks, something you should always be using on the end not being lifted, pushed in firmly on both sides of the wheels.

 

@Mendel Leisk , Loved that you incorporated the 'don't-crush-me' safety stump///

@Prius2006GuitarGuy , that looks like them (18-20 cm max. height). Once you get the car onto the ramps, you can use a floor jack (mendel's picture) to lift the car further, if needed.

 

Another trick, to get more lift outa the venerable Samona jack: I'll roll the front wheels up onto a pair of those ramps, chock the rears very securely, release the parking brake (it's redundant with the wheel chocks, and actually detrimental as you're raising the front), then roll the jack under to the front lift point, with that full regalia that sitting on the cradle in the pic. That gains 4" lift.

The two blocks of 2x have grain going perpendicular to each other, and a couple of dowels in between to lock them together, it's a 1" thick hockey puck atop.

 

Lord of Mercy no the things I'm talking about a homeowner could own they look like two gutters like to hang on your house and they're attached to a motor that centralized to another piece of metal that runs across the two pieces of gutter You drive the tires into the pieces of gutter that's what we're just going to call it here then you get out of the car walk to the front of the car and there's this little reservoir of fluid and a aluminum 3-in dowel with a black knob on it and you push that knob to the right and the motor comes on and starts lifting the gutters which have your tires which are attached to your car and pushes the car up to 22 in off the ground and then when you don't want to do that there's a metal plate that you can drop to replace the gutters that picks the car up under the rocker panels so you can take the wheels off and do what you want there You have a choice of how you want to work Alibaba had these things for $109 yeah I know some people ordered them and they work really well when you think about it not really much to it I've seen people buy these from older tire shops sitting out under the carport part of the shop for a couple hundred dollars they were made by the major list makers back then but it's a very small thing sits right on the concrete it could sit in the dirt kind of like a motorcycle lift but a little wider to get between the rocker panels of a car The Alibaba units have the light gutter type of troughs that you just drive right into If I could get the original old style like my buddy has right up the street at his shop still I would buy it I would pay up to $1,000 for it but I haven't really looked that hard I'll try to find you a picture Just call the homeowner's car lift I mean should pop up gangbusters a bunch of different styles

 

The brand QuickJack may get you started

 

I've recently acquired two products from All German Motorsports, a 3.5 ton rated Jack Rod and a Jack Rod Mini.

They claim you can use a hydraulic floor jack safely, without jackstands using their products.

Jack Rod – AGMProducts

Got them recently on sale with free shipping. Haven't tried them yet, but they look well engineered and built.

Will most likely use them with a jackstand, or two for added safety, but it does prevent the hydraulic floor jack from lowering due to failure/leaking of the seal(s).

Jack Rod – AGMProducts

SM-G781V ?

 

The things I'm talking about if you go to a real tire store in Middle America and walk out the back door out to the carport where they regularly jack up cars and change tires and do stuff outside you'll see this lift sitting on the ground most places have them but any place that's opened up in the last 25 years will not have this they still make them but I think there was something to using them that you know not a safety issue they just everybody wanted the nice new four-post lift with the swing arms and blah blah blah you know how it is like buying cars you know got to keep up with the Joneses people that didn't care about keeping up with the Joneses like Everett and Arrowhead tire in Mebane North Carolina still has his as he should and it gets used a hundred times a day.

 

Are you talking about these lifts?

 

Yeah those would do nicely a bunch of the Chinese companies are selling these and some even have automatic locks on them at different stages of lift and so on they don't look really super secure to me but the few that I've seen seem pretty good so I would try it I'm not scared some of them don't even have whatever certifications lifts and things need to have because they're not made here but I see a lot of things used in Asia China that aren't made here or used here a lot that are pretty effective The one I'm talking about has been used behind tire stores for 75 years It's a flat piece of metal that sits on the ground and 3 ft away from it is this little tower that stands on the ground or mounts on the wall that has a little reservoir of fluid in it and a little motor on it and a hose going back and forth to the device like an air conditioning compressor and you move that handle and that platform raises the rocker panel on the car up so the tire guy that has no lift experience can change your tires without having to put it 6 ft in the air so this was for tire people non-mechanics I'll take a picture of my buddies when I'm over there tomorrow or the next day and post it up it's a standard thing it's been around I'm not sure who makes it The company that makes all the old tire servicing equipment it was a big name most old people should know it by heart airco or something

 

For the front end, first drive the car up on a pair of 2x10x~16 boards, chock the back wheels, then use a 3 ton floor jack on the front jack point, jack it up, and put jack stands on at the pinch weld jack points. The jack stands have these (same shape, not same brand) rubber pads on them, otherwise they would put weight on the body and not the weld.



For the back the boards can be skipped. They are only needed on the front because without them there is zero clearance between the jack handle and the bottom of the car, and it isn't possible to pump the jack.

One of my boards broke the last time I used it, and I will be making a set of short ramps like the ones in the bottom picture here
What ramps or jacks are you using? | PriusChat

 

The Toyota scissor jack cradle main point of contact, where the car bears, is behind that vertical seam, on the car body.

 

I didn't notice that, but it has been a while since I used the scissor jack.

The way the (old, but not recalled, Harbor Freight) jack stands were landing without the rubber inserts wasn't great. One side of the "Y" was touching the body, the pinch weld wasn't cleanly sitting at the bottom of the valley, and the other side of the "Y" was hanging out in the air. With the insert the pinch weld is sitting firmly on the rubber, and to the extent the body is touching the insert, it is on rubber and not metal. The rubber deforms temporarily where the weld sits, which is better than bending metal on the car.

 

The points I marked up in the pic above are heavy gauge steel, at the front end of the main underbody longitudinal railsy . The front ones I got from Hobbit (member here, contributed in past, had his own Prius-dedicated website): they're specific to Gen 2, bui I found them equally applicable with 3rd gen. The rear points are on the "crown" of the heavy-gauge zone around the robust slotted holes (for locking pins when shipping).

The "pinch weld" locations are not used for bearing by the scissor jack. To my eye they look like flimsy knife-edges. Give my points a try, no adapters needed. I've used those points many times, for oil changes, brake work, tire rotations.

Here's a pic, a 6 ton jack stand at the front/left point, looking diagonally across from slightly aft: