Jacking up, Why is it such a palaver? Options

[jjbunn]

I must be doing something wrong, because I find jacking up the 914 safely and easily to be very challenging.

I have a floor jack and four 2.5 ton jack stands. My goal is to get the car raised up so that I can place it on the four jackstands.

Here's what I do:

1) Insert a jack plate in the provided jacking hole on the long on one side of the car.
2) Place chocks on both sides of the opposite rear wheel
3) Position the floor jack under the plate, and start carefully jacking
4) As the car starts to come up, it wants to move rearwards, and so I have the floor jack positioned so that it rolls a little in the required direction
5) Raise the car higher and higher, carefully checking that all four rollers of the jack are still touching the ground - often one starts to lift and I have to lower the jack and reposition everything
6) Get the side high enough that I can put a jack stand under the front jack point (just behind the front wheel) and another under the suspension strut at the rear (not sure which piece this is, but it's a round beam that is anchored at a point just in front of the rear wheel).
7) Gingerly lower the floor jack so that the jack stands take the weight
8) Go to the other side and follow the same procedure, except now the car doesn't shift backwards as it goes up!

Step 4) is where I have most problems ... I'm terrified that the floor jack will become off-vertical and slip or break from the jacking plate, so I have to keep tweaking its position, raising, lowering, etc.. The whole process takes me at least half an hour!

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way?

Sorry for the long winded description (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)

[FourBlades]

So once you get it up there put something else besides 4 jackstands
under it, just in case. I use some mobile home screw jacks. They
can't suddenly collapse because you have to turn them a lot
of turns to raise or lower them. They have wide feet and are very
stable. I could see 4 jackstands tipping over if you lean very
hard on one side of the car. This is really important if all the wheels
are off. You don't want to have to bench press your 2000 lb
car off your chest.

John