Lifting the car

Many lessons were learned and nobody got injured.

I say that up front because we made a few sub-optimal choices. Chiefly - we were doing this on a gravel driveway. I knew going into this that a concrete driveway would have been far better, but reasons.

The most important lesson learned in this phase was that four humble scissor jacks (bought from a local car wreckers for $60) worked much better than the two larger floor jacks on plywood. The floor jacks need to roll forward as they lift and the plywood was soft enough to hinder this. We spent several hours trying to get the floor jacks to work.

We lowered the car on to jack stands. Next time I would also add stacks of wood pallets under the rear of the car, and the ramps back under the front tires so that if the car fell off the stands it would at least be less likely to crush us underneath. The above setup would not survive a mild earthquake. 

Some of the tools I started with.

The car stands were rated at 1200 kg. The car with battery weights 1900 kg. Beefier car stands would be safer. These ones did not look very robust to side loads. 

I also used:

• 4 scissor jacks (NZ$60 from a car dismantle yard)
• a second trolley (like the one on the far right). I screwed them both onto a larger piece of plywood to create a 8 wheeled trolley - which worked really well.

Also: to help get the main HV power plug out I sprayed WD40/CRC on the rotating bit, like this:

 Removing that plug without lubrication is really hard/awkward.