You might need to jack up your Chevy pickup for a number of reasons such as performing routine maintenance or changing the tires. You'll need to know how to do this safely because jacking up a vehicle improperly could result in injury or cause damage to the truck. While you can follow some guidelines for jacking up Chevy pickups, precise instructions will vary depending on your truck model and year, so you should consult your owner’s manual.
Before you begin, pick a flat, solid surface to jack your pickup up on to minimize the chances that it will roll while you're working, causing injury or damage to the truck. Turn on your emergency brake, and secure the wheels to further help prevent rolling. You can secure the wheels with bricks, pieces of scrap wood, or specially made "wheel chokes" found at car shops. Put the materials in front of and behind each wheel to properly secure it.
Once your truck wheels are secure, you're ready to begin jacking it up. Your Chevy pickup should have come with a jack that is designed to fix securely to specific points on the undercarriage. You will know where to put the jack because there will be an indentation behind the front wheels and in front of the back wheels that are specifically designed to fit the head of your jack. Place the jack in line with these points before you begin cranking it up. If you don’t have the jack that came with your truck, you can use several different types of jacks to jack up your pickup. You can find safe points to place the jack in your owner's manual for your pickup's model and year. Once the jack is in place, turn the hand crank to lift the pickup until it is at the desired height.
You may choose to jack your entire truck up (with all four wheels off the ground) or just one side. If you're just jacking up one side, make sure you secure all the wheels that remain on the ground and keep them secure until all four wheels are on the ground again. If you're jacking the entire truck up, you'll need four jack stands, one for each side. After it's jacked up, the truck should be sitting at approximately the same angle that it does when it's on the ground, meaning that you should jack up each side evenly.
