Imagine working on a classic car in your garage, a car that belongs to someone else. Then imagine the shock when that car ends up stuck on a scissor lift in a precarious, scary-looking position.
That is exactly what happened to a Reddit user, Desperate_Bike8508, after they posted a photo of a Morris Minor they had been working on, stuck on one of those lifts. The mechanic posted images of the incident to the r/MechanicAdvice subreddit, looking for help getting the car down.
The post doesn’t really explain how the car got stuck in such a position in the first place. But it was clear the mechanic wasn’t happy about what had happened, spending a sleepless night checking the garage’s cameras to make sure the car was still there and hadn’t fallen.
They did, however, detail how they got the car back on the ground and how long it took. That came as a relief to the mechanic and other Reddit users, who were worried the Morris had suffered damage in the accident. Thankfully, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
How the Morris Was Brought Back to Earth
Car stuck on failed scissor lift- UPDATE!
by
u/Desperate_Bike8508 in
MechanicAdvice
“It was a fairly sleepless night checking the camera to see if the car was still upright at regular intervals,” said the mechanic in his Reddit post. The mechanic believed that the British classic was secure enough when the lift went up, but it suddenly rolled forward and ended up nose-first, with only the rear wheels still on the lift.
“The ramp does/did have a manual release valve, but due to the precarious way it sat on the ramp & the fact that the lift has to raise before going down as a safety mechanism, I
was sweating bullets before I plucked up the courage to press it,” said the mechanic, clearly stressed out big time by the situation. “Needless to say, it was ratchet-strapped to the lift and safety ropes to the structure of the building; it nearly went over on the initial pull, and they deemed it too risky to try and release it,” they added.
To get it down, they had to do some slightly sketchy yet clever things. It was all well and good getting the car on the ground, but it was no good doing so if it meant damaging the car. They used a combination of a forklift, timber blocks, and some protection, and it took three hours to get the Morris back on the ground without damaging the classic car.
The Mechanic Tried To Look on the Bright Side of Life
While all this was going on, the mechanic tried to stay positive and look on the bright side. Quite literally, too. “No word of a lie, I played Monty Python’s Always Look On The Bright Side of Life and thought of the potential things that could go wrong on finally lifting the entire car’s weight on the forklift,” they said. “It may now be my favourite song of all time as a result.”
They also tried to get a local fire service to come and help. But there were extreme storms at the time this was happening in the UK, so they weren’t able to come out until around a week later, which the mechanic said was totally understandable. He did admit that the fire service laughed when they heard what had happened! Thankfully, as the images showed, the car came back down to Earth okay and didn’t look to have suffered any damage. A relief to both the mechanic and the owner of the car as well.