The Ultimate DIY Budget Wheel Cribs Guide | How To Build Wooden Wheel Stands - In Metric!

The Ultimate DIY Budget Wheel Cribs Guide | How To Build Wooden Wheel Stands - In Metric!

In this video, I share a guide on how to make low-budget wheel cribs, AKA wooden wheel stands.

Here is the shopping list to make these wheel cribs yourself:
16x 2.4M Lengths of wood: https://ebay.us/obdxGj or https://www.diy.com/departments/metsa...
500x 4.5 x 75mm Decking screws: https://ebay.us/JhTSDI

You'll want a low-entry high-lift jack to get the car lifted onto them too:
Sealey 2.5 Ton Jack: https://ebay.us/wR3cz3

Here are the tools you'll need:
Circular saw: https://ebay.us/NWrDgp
Woodworking Clamps: https://ebay.us/kZYxoV
Wood drill bits: https://ebay.us/qqt9fv
Dewalt Impact gun: https://ebay.us/82Wy7X
Impact Screwdriver Bit Set: https://ebay.us/nFTnX2
Dewalt Sander: https://ebay.us/LkEAbV

The design changed part way into the video when I realised I'd miscalculated and purchased a length of wood too many. But this turned out to be a happy accident because I modified the design slightly to make it even more sturdy and heavy-duty.

Thanks to this, I am extremely confident in the safety and longevity of these wheel stands. I'd be confident sitting a Rolls Royce on top of them.

All of the measurements and information in this description is to make the uprated final version of these wooden wheel cribs that I showed part way into the vid.

The problem I have which spurred me onto creating DIY wheel stands out of wood stems from working on my BMW E30 restoration project. Whenever I need to work under the car int he garage, I have a very unpleasant time wedged under the car in a tight space.

I spent some time shopping around for off-the-shelf solutions to this, I considered extra tall jack stands, the type they use on trucks, but they would not lift the car high enough for me.

I even considered metal wheel stands, the type they use to do wheel alignments, but they are ridiculously expensive for what they are and I could not justify spending the best part of a grand one something so basic.

Finally I priced up the angle iron to make a set of my own, welded together. Unfortunately I was also knocked back by the price of this, metal is very expensive these days. That's when I turned to wood, and discovered lots of other automotive restoration enthusiasts come to this same conclusion.

First things first, I created the design on paper which I show in the video. I did this with a combination of factors in the front of my mind:
Safety of resulting stands
Cost of materials
Availability of materials
Working height achieved

The design was heavily influenced by other wheel crib designs I'd seen online and I went out of my way to create my own version of them taking all of the best ideas I saw and turning them into one ultimate DIY wheel crib design.

As a bonus, I also designed the whole thing based on metric measurements which is something I looked for but could not find in other how-to guides.

Having scoured around for the best priced materials, I opted to steer away from the heftier 2x4 sized timber, for the more sensibly sized budget timber available at my local hardware store for very cheap in 2.4m lengths.

Knowing this, I got to designing my stands based on this fundamental type of wood. I came up with a design that uses layers of wood screwed together, with batons on the top to stop the car's wheels from rolling off the top, which was a concern I have with the shorter blocks I'd previously made. The batons on the top are what makes these known as wooden wheel cribs rather than just wooden wheel stands.

The finished design is 38cm tall, 48cm long, and 30cm wide. Giving a wheel lift platform of 34.2cm which puts the underside of the car quite high from the ground.

To build them you will need 48x 48cm lengths, and 48x 30cm lengths of wood, cut from the 16 lengths of 2.4m CLS timber, this means very little wastage. I cut mine with a circular saw after marking them in batches. I then sanded down and rough edges to minimise spilnters.

To assemble them, use the decking screws, you'll need around 500 of them and I recommend doing 2 screws per join for extra strength.

When all was said and done, the BMW E30 I'm wording on ended up with a 50cm lift between the ground and the underbody of the car, which is plenty of room to work in. A roaring success and should make working on this garage restoration a breeze going forward.

For more helpful how-to guides and restorations: https://www.spannerrash.com/

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#wheelcribs #wheelstands #diy #restoration