6r Jacking point trouble

[RUM4MO]

They really are a proper solution. Why on earth Vdub don't sell them as accessory across the range is beyond me. Do you also have them on the rear?

They're only meant to be used on a lift which hits all four. You may damage the floor lifting on a single one using a trolley jack.

Ah, that sort of makes sense. I thought lifts had rubber lifting pads anyway?

It's all a bit mad, you shouldn't have to go all round the houses just to ensure you don't damage the rustproofing when you jack the car. You end up coming back to a strudy bit wood between the car and jack to spread the load. Which is how I did it for years before I could afford something decent.

You are right about normal workshop lifts having a selection of pads available, if they were to use these 4-off protectors to any cars that had them fitted, they would probably only do that if they had specific adaptors that could engage up into the hard plastic part so that the lift was fix/located to these 4-off lifting points, and as these are only supplied form factory fitted to Audi TTs, then most workshop would not expect to encounter them, and so use the usual lift positions.

[Mikeso51]

I’ve just fitted a set of the Audi TT pads, and they are very satisfactory. I use a trolley jack together with a plate which locates in the hole in the centre of the pad, and they are very secure. No obvious signs of stress when lifting one corner at a time. The only drawback is that they are relatively expensive. I still use the slotted hockey puck I bought on eBay on the sill with another jack or an axle stand for added security. This puck has shown none of the issues mentioned by veteran, and after more than a year’s regular use has not significantly damaged the underseal nor shown any signs of splitting. Maybe I was lucky with the one I bought - there seem to be a lot of smaller ones on the market (mine is 75mm diameter) which are not modified hockey pucks, and may be made of inferior material.

[veteran]

Jeez, I could write a book on this subject. For the present, I'll just add a few extra comments.

First, using a piece of wood between a trolley-jack's saddle and a part of the floorpan: depending on the size, shape, and type of wood, this could be risky, as the wood could in due course split apart, under the load. You'd then be in real trouble, with the saddle (some of them are castellated) gouging into the floorpan. A flat piece of wood has potential to slip as well. The Audi TT pads, when used with an adaptor that sits on the saddle of the trolley-jack, do not suffer from these drawbacks.

Second, VW might have simply chosen not to fit the Audi TT pads as standard on Polos simply because they assume that the average owner would probably never make use of them because of the need for a hefty trolley-jack. Also, it'd be daft to always have to carry a trolley-jack in the boot in order to use those pads out on the road, so for wheel-changing in the event of a puncture VW merely supplies a compact wind-up jack, which is specifically meant to be used on those short strengthened knife-edge sections of the cill. The standard wheel-changing scenario will involve the knife-edge section needing to lift, at maximum, one quarter of the weight of the car (which is quite a lot!). This is because there are already three other wheels on the ground, taking the other three-quarters of the weight. If you instead just slap a trolley-jack, plus a piece of wood, under the car and lift either the whole front half or back half of the car, then you are requiring that jack and piece of wood to support half the weight of the car. Of course, if you're lifting with trolley and wood only in order to then park some axle stands underneath, and you can do it all before calamity ensues, then all well and good!

The set of four Audi TT pads are fitted into parts of the outer floorpan that are stronger than further in, and although I bought the special saddle adaptor to go with mine, I found it tricky each time to locate the saddle exactly underneath the pad before starting the lifting. And BTW, you have to be careful that you choose the correct holes in the floorpan to use for these.

I also seem to recall that both the front TT pads and the rear ones, when fitted, only just clear the extremeties of the protective undertrays of the Polo. This means that an MOT tester using a conventional crossbar to lift first the front then the rear of the vehicle would probably miss those pads. Aside from MOT tester ignorance about these pads, this may be one reason why, when lifting the car, MOT testers invariably use the vehicle's cills regardless. These days, if you're very lucky and the MOT station uses not a conventional crossbar but instead a spider-armed lifter, then it'd be possible for each saddle of the spider to use a strengthened knife-edge. But if those tester's saddles don't have strong v-shaped pucks built into them to mate with the knife-edges, it seems to me inevitable that the knife-edges will eventually bend under the subsequent load. And if the tester were as daft as to use an unstrengthened part of the cill for lifting, likely the cill's welded seam would split.

Axle stands for use with the knife-edge sections: If you search carefully enough on the Web - particularly on eBay or Amazon - you can find axle stands that incorporate v-shaped saddles. Others are designed to take a third-party v-shaped rubberised puck. But beware of most pucks, as many won't last that long and will split in two eventually. Pucks used in this way need to be made of especially durable, hardened rubber, and so only the kinds made by, for example, Planger (BPR Systems GmbH, Germany) will be appropriate. Planger do a round one with V-groove (for sitting on the saddle of a trolley-jack), but I believe they also have a V-grooved one that's designed to sit astride an axle stand.