My name is Alec Carlson.
I’m the floor manager here at the automobile driving museum.
I take care of exhibits research, historical documentation, preparation for vehicles to
go off the campus for different events, car shows, parades, you name it.
Well here at the Automobile Driving Museum, we’re a collection of about 140 cars ranging
all the way from 1886 all the way up to our most recent vehicle which is 2000.
We do have classes here.
In fact on the other side of our shop is a 1955 GMC truck which is part of our all girls
restoration project so it’s a team of about 10 women that have taken a corner of our shop
and this vehicle to learn how to restore a vehicle themselves and then we do have shop
classes, intermediate classes and so forth.
We use pretty much every imaginable automotive tool and piece of equipment out there from
air tools, air compressors, of course automotive lifts, anything that you can think of to keep
a car either maintained and running for future generations or for restoration.
We have a multitude of BendPak lifts actually.
Four are in our shop.
I have one lift outside.
Five in one garage.
Three in another and 8 in another.
So I suppose you do the math and you can tell me but a quite a few.
We’ve been going to BendPak for lifts for over 10 years now.
We at one point only had two BendPak lifts and those were in our shop and we decided
to solve a storage problem by of course elevating vehicles and parking underneath so we purchased
quite a few and had them all installed.
Well over 10, almost 20 lifts I think.
And I’ve never really had any problems with them.
They’re safe, they’re reliable, they’re easy to service and maintain.
It’s a nice piece of equipment.
The reason we have so many lifts and so many storage facilities, our museum showroom floor
is only so big and it only can house about 50% of our collection and with that obviously
a lot of cars would either be outside or parked right on the ground which limits storage space
so we decided to install lifts in all of our storage garages and with that it allows us
to rotate our collection so every week I have 5 to 10 different cars coming off the museum
floor, out into storage and that same number of cars coming back into the museum so I always
tell people you can come back in three days and see something you did not see before.
It’s always different here.
I only had to contact customer service once
and as far as calling customer service
it was very easy, there was no problem.
I got a quick response Immediately got to the process of scheduling a time to have it
come looked at and then of course repaired.
The lifts on the left side of the shop here behind me are maintenance and service repair
lifts which are used more frequently, cars are on and off them constantly.
Coming in for brake jobs, lubrication service, general repair, you name it.
And then the lifts on the other side of the shop are more for projects so vehicles that
go onto those lifts will be there until the project is complete or near complete and as
far as the storage garages are concerned which are 100% four post drive on lifts those are
used, each lift is probably used at least once a month.
So the lift behind me is a XPR-10AS asymmetric lift.
We have so many projects going on, And general maintenance and repair and cars being used
at such a great rate get things done faster so we ordered these two asymmetric which are
virtually limitless for our needs.
It’s like instrumentally helpful.
I have to have them.
It's probably my most useful lift.
Reason being, I have so many different types of vehicles and sizes of vehicles
So with a lift like this I don’t have to even consider that I am reaching beyond the
limits of the lift.
But I have large 3500 grade dually dodge truck that I also have to service.
That can pick that up Now I don’t have to send it to the Dodge dealer I can take care
of it myself in my own shop and not have to worry about my lift being maxed out.
it allows me to have a car more or less off centered to where I can have a door open on
the vehicle while it’s in the air or sitting somewhere on the post within its lift range.
I’ve never had a failure.
I’ve never had an issue.
The lifts have most definitely been meeting expectations.
These lifts are used every day.
It’s a nice piece.
We’ve always had a great relationship with BendPak.
We really enjoy the products I rely heavily on them.
In the past year we created another storage facility here on the property and of course
every open space will become occupied with plenty of cars so we have four more on order
that will in short order be here and installed and ready to be used like the rest of them
and I’m sure there will be even more steel after that in the years to come as the collection
gets larger and more facilities for storage are built here on the property.
With each passing generation more and more information is lost and the art of keeping
these antique vehicles running will be gone.
So I need to play sponge and learn as much as I can and then exercise those tools here.
This is the place to do it.
We’re a museum.
We’re all about keeping history alive for the next generation.
It’s what we do.