floor jack problems

maybe someone else has had the same problem with their floor jack. ive got this older 3 1/2 ton floor jack that i bought like 10 yrs ago. this thing was the best tool i bought, ive used the crap out of it. but awhile back it slowly got weaker and weaker to the point where i jack it up and as soon as it gets any weight on it it wont go up any higher.. so basically its useless. question is do the rams actually where out? can it be fixed by just adding more hydralic fluid? ive already bought a new one but its not as big as my old one, i kept it sitting around thinking maybe one day i might be able to fix it. hate to throw it out.

Edited: 5/12/2007 6:10:38 PM by dragnram

sounds to me like it might have bad seals in it, call your local pump/cylinder rebuild shop & tell them whats going on

Man this is what I used to do for a living, for about 3 years. Theres one of two things wrong. Either your pump cup (cup seal) is bad, and when you pump fluid some goes into the ram chamber but once it feels any pressure it pushed fluid back past the seal. The other problem would be a bad ram cup. If this si the case, there will likely be some fluid coming out of the top of the jack (you will have to turn the floorjack over to see). If its the pump cup you can get a new one for about $.50 and fix it in about 20 minutes. If its the ram, you will need to pull the thing apart entirely, and you might as well just rebuild it. A rebuild job is around $120-160. A rebuild kit is about $20-40 depending on the jack. If its Lincoln or Hein-Werner it will be cheap and most hydraulic/bearing places will have the kit on the shelf. To do it yourself, is not that hard, but it takes some specific tools, and some very large tools. Such as a 4 foot pipe wrench, and sometimes some very large spanner sockets.

yah it sounds like you just blew out the seal in it