Ed from Uckfield Motor Services has a look at the Dama HDM3.5 scissor lift.
This is a mid-rise ramp which comes in two versions: 3 and 3.5 tonne versions. We’ve got a 3.5 tonne version to review today, which is great so we can lift anything like a van or a short smaller van and EVs because EVs these days are getting heavier and heavier.
It runs on a 13 amp plug so you can plug it into the mains and use it straight away. That’s the beauty of it. It’s mobile but it can also be fixed to the ground. If you found somewhere, a location in your workshop, that you want it to be fixed in, you can bolt it down to stay there.
We’ve got lots of ramps everywhere, but we sometimes come unstuck where we’ve got a car stuck on a ramp and then we’ve got a technician who hasn’t got a ramp to work on. So this would be really nice because you can squeeze in between places or even go in front of the ramp that a tech’s currently working on and he can just carry on working, which is really good for us.
When working on any vehicle on a ramp, you obviously want to make sure that the equipment that you’re using is nice and safe and this Dama ramp comes with a lot of good safety features. The main one is the lockout, so it locks out five different locations and makes it really safe. It’s also on the box, you’ve got the main red cutoff switch. Also, when you’re bringing it down, it makes a noise, it’s got a siren on it and a red flashing light on it.
It’s low profile. It’s only 110mm when it’s at its lowest position.
Make sure with any sort of ramp or anything like that, they are checked every six months. It’s actually a requirement. We get ours done for our insurance. So we make sure all our ramps are safe around the workshop.
We’ve got quite shiny painted floors here and I was worried it would move forward as we went on there and there was no problem there at all. Moving it about was nice and easy, so you can put it anywhere in the workshop.
So if you’re looking for a ramp that is versatile and it can move around and you haven’t quite got the space to stick it somewhere permanently, I think this is a really, really good option and I’m personally probably going to have a word with Hickleys about potentially keeping the ramp and buying it and purchasing it off them because it will do us really well.
