Carpoint Trolley Jack – Product Review

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Dale Vinten

Some form of jack is absolutely essential if you own a classic car and enjoy tinkering. Getting your car off the ground is a necessity for many DIY jobs. From removing a wheel and changing brake pads to more complex fettling like replacing a propshaft, a good jack is fundamental. Chances are your car already has one in the boot, whether that be a scissor type unit or a more vehicle specific item and they’re fine for emergency road side tyre changes and the like but for home tinkering it’s better to at least have a proper trolley jack in amongst your tools.

Trolley jacks come in all shapes and sizes with myriad lifting ranges. There are low profile ones for getting under lowered vehicles if you’ve chosen to slam your particular classic to the ground and there are heavy duty jacks that are more suited to larger, more weighty cars and trucks, for example. They all essentially do the same job, however. Which one you choose depends on your specific vehicle and personal requirements but our decision was based on budget and portability. We have a heavy duty trolley jack but it weighs an absolute ton and is a bit of a pig to manoeuvre every time we want to quickly jack up our classics for those quick, five-minute jobs so we wanted to add a smaller, lighter jack to our collection. That’s where the Carpoint 2 ton trolley jack comes in.

Get your two-tonne Carpoint trolley jack here.

The Product

You may not have heard of Carpoint. That’s fine, neither had we, but at just over forty quid and with a four stars out of five average review score on Amazon we thought we’d give it a go. Looking at the company’s other offerings it seems they offer a budget range of automotive tools and accessories, including furry dice. Make of that what you will but we’re looking at it’s jacking offering today. The product in question, the Carpoint two tonne trolley jack, is exactly the kind of compact, lightweight jack that we were after. Weighing in at less than 9kg and only 46cm long it certainly fits our requirements and with a handy carrying handle it’s a doddle to chuck about, whether that be positioning it under the car or slinging it in the boot because you don’t trust your 25-year-old, £700 Volvo not to breakdown on any trip longer than 50 miles.

The Test

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The perfect opportunity to test out the Carpoint trolley jack presented itself recently when we needed to get our car off the ground in order to flush the cooling system for our latest how to article that will go live next week. Yes, we do practice what we preach here at Car & Classic. We were using a bucket to collect all of the old coolant but it was too tall to fit under the radiator and so we had to break out the jack and get the car up in the air for adequate clearance, resting it on jack stands, obviously. It was so much easier to whip the smaller jack out of the garage and throw it under the car without struggling with ‘the beast’, all the while harbouring a constant fear of chronic back pain.

The Result

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With the Carpoint trolley jack easily positioned it was a doddle to raise the thing up to a height that allowed easy access to the under side of the car. Our test Volvo has been lowered by 40mm all round but there was still plenty of clearance to get underneath and the jack felt sturdy throughout. At no point were we unconvinced of its capabilities. The removable handle is a good length with plenty of leverage and little effort was required to operate the hydraulics. We left the jack under load for ten minutes before installing our jack stands to test for any leakage but the car remained at the same height without any sagging. Releasing the pressure from the system using the notched handle is simple too and the action is smooth enough.

The Verdict – 4 out of 5

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The Carpoint two tonne trolley jack does exactly what it’s supposed to and does it well, without any fuss. It’s a solid, portable little unit that just works. The lifting range might not be large enough for some but then depending on your vehicle and clearance you can always use additional blocks for extra height. It wouldn’t be any good for properly lowered vehicles but for every day classics it’ll work just fine and at £42 you can’t really go wrong. We probably wouldn’t rely on it as our sole means of jacking but for those quick spannering sessions it’s bang on.

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