Thanks for the info, Greatbear. This most recent time, I guess I wasn't using the right part of the frame (although I've used it before with no problems, I thought!). Using the picture up above as a reference: I was using the area about 3 inches INBOARD from where Randy's jack is positioned. This is sort of an L-shaped strip that runs from just forward of the front jack point to about two-thirds of the way to the rear jack point. I had though that it was pretty heavy-duty frame, but it bent a bit from the lifting...I need to identify the Randy point for next time, I guess...

 

I saw this link on the mini2 site a while back. I've bought a fair amount of Facom tools from the UG, so I've frequented the site before--I just never stumpled across this section. BTW, I'm in no way affiliated with the UG--in fact, I stopped buying there for a while because I found the owner unacceptably rude. Still, the guy knows his stuff:

MC floor jack/jackstands

To see more details on the jackstands click here:

Jackstands

I'll admit that $100 per jackstand is a bit more than I'd like to pay, but when you think of it, that's the cost of a CAI. Surely one's safety is worth that much? They're also great fetish objects!

 

Yeah...I remember looking that up a while back. But there is no way in hell I'm spending that much for jack stands. That's just crazy. But this does bring up a point of mine. Looky here:



The points where the stands are just happen to be the points that I used for using my jack. Unfortunately, this area is soft. Maybe someone that knows how the car is put together can explain better, but my jack dug into this, but the teeth of the jack, and the pressure in general. There is a fairly serious indentation from where I last used the jack on it. Anyway...I had been using the jack on this point and then using the stands at the factory points.

Does anyone have anything else that they can add to this discussion?

 

At this point I may be simply summing up the obvious, but the two methods articulated in this post are:

1) Use the jack points to jack the car and then the areas on the unibody to support the jackstands (if you have rubber pads on flat jackstand pads); or

2) Use the areas on the unibody to jack the car (if you have a rubber pad on a flat lift pad) and then the jack points to support jackstands (it they have the "U" shaped pads).

Chitown_COOP--you write of the "teeth of the jack" scoring the bottom of your car. Did you use a rubber pad between your car's underbody and the jack's lift pad?

 

No. I don't have a rubber pad and I didn't use one. Apparently, this is the "standard" method. Yes, the "teeth" did cut into the unibody a bit, but additionally, there was a serious indentation on the unibody larger than the head of the jack, i.e. half the weight of the car on the unibody is does not make it happy. I'll try to take pictures and post tomorrow...My main concern is that the unibody itself isn't really designed to hold one half or one quarter of the car's weight on it the way that the factory points are. See what I'm getting at? Maybe using some sort of makeshift rubber chunk will make that less of an issue....we'll see.