Pro Eagle extension on HF 1.5T jack

This is probably useless to almost everybody, but if you want to use a small HF jack on your lifted taco, this worked for me. I had to do a bunch of hunting on McMaster to find a shim for this, so I thought I’d share.

Note of caution, the HF jacks are known to vary in construction, so proceed knowing everything you do is your fault.

I like the Harbor Freight 1.5 jack, it’s little, it’s light and it’s been plenty strong for me. However, it’s too short to lift the taco very high without some sort of help. Normally, I stack 2x6 cut offs... which is dangerous. Also my truck, sans gear, sans me, scales at about 3900 lbs.

Enter, the Pro Eagle extension. It’s pricey, but sweet. They say that it might just fit other brands of jacks, but they’re not talking about my little guy. The extension from pro eagle fits a much larger diameter than the HF 1.5T jack’s lifting plate. Maybe it fits the bigger HF jacks, I don’t know.

Because the extension is so far from fitting, you gotta order the pro eagle jack plate adapter thing/lifting pad or whatever they call it. It’s in the accessories on their website.

Once you have the adapter plate and the extension, you can actually fit it up, but it’s super wobbly and I thought it felt like garbage.
After measuring the jack linkage and the adapter plate a bunch of times, I found a shim washer that would sit in the adapter plate and slip the jack linkage pin. The face on the adapter that mates with the pin flange is on a taper/is chamfered, or whatever, but the shim washer is so thin (0.5mm) that I figured I’d just hammer it into form.
This worked really well, I took out nearly all the play that allowed the sketchy wobble.

Tools needed for this are
snap ring pliers
hammer.

How to hammer this thing home:
Add shim washers as shown here, around the linkage pin, already hammered in place:


When you add shims, it’s going to make the horizontal linkage bar not fit, it’ll lift it up too high, until you hammer the vertical linkage pin back down. It’s a nice solid pin though, great for hammering, so get in there. It turns the shim stack, effectively, into a cone washer:


Basically, take the jack’s horizontal linkage bar out, swap the pro eagle adapter plate in, with shim washers (one or two at a time so they hammer into place easily, my sweet spot was four total), Insert the horizontal bar back in its place, hammer the center pin till the bar slides all the way through, repeat till all the play is taken out of from between the lifting plate and the jack, then just put the snap rings back on the horizontal bar and done.

The shims I used:
I had to buy 25 shims... ≈$13.

Don’t pay any attention to that old HF plate. Doneski.


Now you have a small jack that lifts to 28.5” high. I’m happy because my frame is at about 19” right now; and unaided, my little jack lifts to like 14”.

 

I carry one of these and some 2x6s. I'll look into this

 

@johnnywideopen

This is a bit of a necro, but I wanted to thank you publicly for your original post. This was the only acceptable solution to mating a Pro Eagle plate to my 1.5 ton HF jack. It took five shims to do the job, but now it's good to go!

For anyone else trying to follow OP's instructions, you will almost certainly end up going through McMaster-Carr. The site is a little weird because they don't quote you shipping at the time of order. You end up paying the actual cost of UPSing your order to you. I received the pack of shims the second business day after ordering. Cost breakdown was as follows:

Merchandise 12.59
Shipping 8.94

I hope this helps someone else who would like to retrofit their HF Jack in this manner. Of course, tamper at your own risk!

 

Mcmaster is great! If you need a shipping quote you can just message or call them. They get it to you pretty quickly through email. They never uncharge it so if it's just a small hardware package its usually in the $6-10 range.

 

Thanks again @johnnywideopen for sending me a handful of the shims.

I drilled out the top plate a while ago to fit the center pin of the ProEagle and it wobbled a little bit for many months but all I did was rotate the tires twice in that time.

Today I took the shims and put one at a time on the Pro Eagle center pin, place it on top of the adapter plate and hammer it down. I think it took 4 to add enough thickness to make the shaft on the jack fit through it snug and keep the adapter plate flush against the square top plate of the jack.

BroEagle project complete!

Since I didn't add wheels like others have, I can still use it on the girlfriends Subaru and when I need to use it on my truck, I just add the extension. If I need to use it off-road, I just pull out the 2x6 behind the rear seat and toss that underneath so the jack doesn't sink.

 

I did the shim route as well. Worked for me. Does anyone else get a lil nervous that the extended plate can rotate out of the base either direction? Like counter-clockwise or clockwise...seems like a stop on one end would be preferable

 

If the extension rotates and pulls away from the base plate with the weight of the truck on it, there's something strange happening!

 

Wish I'd seen this thread rather than the other thread(s) on the topic. Wasted a lot of time this morning trying to do this using parts recommendations that presumably worked for an older version of the 1.5T jack, but don't work on the one I just got. Hopefully this does the trick.

 

Three shims and she's done. I like it.