Hoisting solution

[Jowe]

I found this neat solution from Brabus at Techno-Classica on hoisting the car up w/o disturbing underbody.

[Bonnyboy]

Sweet.

You would have to be very confident about the condition of the car you hoisted up though.   Of the few cars I have had a close look at recently, I wouldn't trust that setup on any of them, even though one of them had a shiny new paint job.

The first thing I do when I see a pagoda (or 190sl) in a showroom is get on my back and have a look under the car.  A couple of the so called "restorations" I have seen recently were nothing more than "lipstick on a pig".   I would definitely be afraid to hoist them up using those jacking holes. 

[Jonny B]

A very innovative approach, but as Bonnyboy posted, I would be very hesitant to use that on an unknown or uninspected car. The jack points can be a weak link.

[wwheeler]

I have a small lift in the garage and was intrigued by this. However, aside from the jack points possibly being weak which is known problem area, the other problem I see with this approach is stability. It would seem like you could not do a lot of work in the air that would cause the car to wiggle around. Not sure how secure those mounts would be. I would imagine the jack points were designed from the factory to be used so that the three other tires were on the ground creating stability.

If you were using this approach simply to raise and lower the car, maybe. But work under it? Not sure. 

[280SE Guy]

Considering all of the precautions as stated, did you know the first use of those jacking points was to marry the body to the chassis at the factory?

Regards,

280SE Guy

[wwheeler]

That is a cool picture and have had it on my desk top before and in fact came from you. This might be a chicken and egg story. Not sure which came first. Did they design the jack hoist system and then say Hey, this is a great place to lift the cars during assembly? Or vise versa? Or at the same time?

My guess considering the complexity of designing an entire jacking system is that it was the primary. You can devise all sorts of ways to lift the body. Of course the first use for that car is in the assembly. I wonder at what point in assembly they start using this feature? They could possibly use that as the foundation for the assembly of the body during welding.   

[280SE Guy]

It was probably one of those shazam moments when the car designers were working with the production engineers trying to figure out some of the production techniques, or just the production engineers taking advantage of an already "in place" hoising point.