Jacking Points: Where to Lift a Car With PPF or a Wrap

A tire change is a lifting job, and on a protected car the lifting point and the film edge often sit in the same place. Nobody thinks about it: the car goes up, comes back down, and the sill looks the same. If your car wears paint protection film or a colour change wrap, that routine hour on the lift is where a small mistake turns into a visible one.

What the Jack Does to Your Sill

The rocker panel is not a flat piece of metal. It is a folded edge welded to the floor of the car, and that folded seam is what holds the body side to the structure. Technicians call it the pinch weld. It is also the part of the car that takes road spray, road salt and grit all its life.

Jack a car on that folded seam and the metal takes a permanent set. The flange bends, the weld can crack, and water gets into a seam that is supposed to stay closed. A bent rocker also pushes the door out of alignment. On a wrapped or filmed car, the same jack does a second kind of damage: the film edge along the sill is thin, already stretched tight, and exactly where the jack foot lands.

The Jack Points Your Car Already Has

Every passenger car has factory lifting points, and the manufacturer reinforced them for this job. On most vehicles you find reinforced points on the pinch weld flange behind the front and rear doors, and on many vehicles a reinforced section further inboard under the sill. The owner's manual or the sticker in the door jamb shows where they are.

The jack belongs on the sill line, in the narrow spot the manufacturer built for it, and that is rarely where people guess. If the jack goes on the pinch weld itself, or a few inches inboard, the car is being lifted in the wrong place.

• The reinforced jack point behind each door
• Whether your car uses the pinch weld flange or the inner sill rail
• What goes between the jack and the body
• Whether the film edge gets checked while the wheels are off

Ask those four questions before the car goes up. A shop that mounts tires every day should be able to answer them without guessing.

Protecting the Film While the Car Is Up

Put a wide pad between the jack and the car. A purpose-made rubber or plastic jack pad spreads the load across a bigger area, and two layers of rubber mat does the same job. It costs nothing and protects the metal and the film at once.

The sill is the most common place we see a PPF edge lift, and it is nearly always a narrow jack foot pressing into the edge of the film. The same pressure creases a wrap edge, and a crease in stretched film does not come back out. Say so when you book the tires: we would rather show you the pad and the lifting points before the car goes up than replace a rocker panel afterwards.

Winter Makes It Worse

Vancouver does not get the salt load eastern Canada gets, but it does get road salt on the highways and wet grit on the streets, and between November and March a car sits in that grime for weeks.

Two things change when the car goes up in that season. The sill is wet and gritty, so a narrow foot slides and bites into the metal rather than sitting on it. And the car goes up and down more often, because winter tires get swapped twice a year, and every swap is another chance for a narrow foot to find the edge of the film. Rinse the sill after the change, or let a maintenance wash handle it while the salt is still loose on the metal.

What the Damage Looks Like Later

The film tells you first. A crushed edge shows up as a flat, dull band along the bottom of the sill, a lifted corner, or a fine crease line running along the rocker. Look at the underside of the door and the bottom of the rocker panel, not just the outside face, because that is where the jack landed.

The metal tells you later. A bent pinch weld starts to weep rust along the seam, and the paint above it bubbles at the crease lines long before anyone notices the metal underneath. A car jacked in the wrong place can look clean for years and still be rotting from the bottom up.

If your car carries film or a wrap, the next tire change is the moment to get it right. Bring the car to our Vancouver shop and we will show you the lifting points we use and the pad we put under the jack.