What size bottle jack for bus?

[bdavis441]

I'm going to buy a couple of bottle jacks at Harbor freight to work on the bus. What tonnage are you guys using to lift your buses with?

[lapeer20m]

an entire 72 passenger bus weighs about 20K pounds. so a 10 ton jack should be more than sufficient, since you're only lifting a quarter or half of the weight of the bus at any given time.

make sure to get one with a long stroke. My bus was stuck in the sand and i had a bottle jack that only lifted about 4 or 5 inches. That wasn't enough to accomplish anything useful.

[KC10Chief]

I try to avoid that Harbor Freight crap, but you might be able to find a good bottle jack. The price difference in bottle jacks vs how much they can lift isn't much. I need to get one too. I'm just going to buy the biggest bottle jack I can get. Home Depot sells them, even Wal-Mart. They both sell bottle jacks that are big enough to lift a bus.

[KC10Chief]

This baby at Home Depot sells for $50. It's a 20 ton jack and should be able to lift two whole buses at once. I like to go overkill a bit. If you're only lifting around 5,000 pounds of bus, then you're not really putting a lot of wear and tear on your jack!

[the_experience03]

Remember the HF rule of thumb that you half any listed capacity or specification to get an accurate rating. 20 ton sounds like a good choice to me.

[wmah]

I have two jacks one for travel and one for home. My home one is a large 5 ton floor jack which lifts anything I want to lift. In the bus I have a 20 ton bottle jack.