Ranger RP-20T: 18 in. Between the Rails and 8 in. of Stroke

Every shop press is sold on tonnage, and tonnage is rarely what decides whether the press does your job. The RP-20T has plenty of it — 20 ton, or 40,000 lbs (18,144 kg) of pressing force — but the two numbers to write down before you buy are the 18 in. (457 mm) inside width between the rails and the 8 in. (203 mm) cylinder stroke. The first tells you what will physically pass between the uprights. The second tells you how far the ram travels before you have to stop, reposition the table, and start again.

Those two figures are the difference between pressing a wheel bearing out in one continuous stroke and pressing it out in three bites with a stack of spacers. They are printed further down this page because they matter more than the headline.

Will It Fit Your Shop?

The RP-20T stands 59 in. (1,499 mm) tall and 23 in. (584 mm) wide, which puts it comfortably under a standard garage ceiling and lets it live against a wall rather than needing an island of floor. It is a floor-standing H-frame press, so what it needs from the building is simple: a flat, hard, level surface that will not let a leg settle. A press that stands on an uneven slab racks its frame slightly under load, and a racked frame is one that throws a pressed part sideways when it finally lets go.

Give yourself working room on both open sides. You need to be able to stand square to the work, swing a bar, and get out of the way — parts under press load release suddenly and travel. Eye protection and a face shield are not optional on this machine, and neither is keeping bystanders out of the plane of the work.

There is no electrical requirement. The RP-20T is hand-powered hydraulics, so it works in an unwired corner of a barn as readily as in a wired bay. Confirming that your floor and your clearances suit the machine is the buyer's responsibility, and both are easy to check with a tape measure and a spirit level before the crate arrives.

How 20 Ton of Force Gets Made

The pressing force comes from a 20 ton bottle jack driving down the centre of a heavy steel H-frame. A bottle jack is a self-contained hydraulic unit — reservoir, pump and ram in one body — and that self-containment is exactly why this design has outlived fancier ones on shop floors. There are no external hoses to chafe, no separate reservoir to knock over, and nothing about the hydraulics that a shop cannot understand at a glance.

Forty thousand pounds is a great deal of force concentrated on a small area, and it is worth being blunt about what that means. It is enough to move a seized bearing race, a stubborn ball joint or a pressed-on gear. It is also enough to shatter hardened components without warning. Support the work properly on the arbor plates, keep the ram square to the part, and stop and rethink whenever the press starts asking for more than the job should reasonably need.

The Adjustable Table Is the Feature You Will Use Every Day

The table moves vertically up and down the frame and pins in place at your chosen height. That is what makes a single stroke length work across wildly different jobs: bring the table up close for a small bushing so the ram meets the work almost immediately, drop it away for a long shaft or a spring so there is somewhere for the part to go.

Set the table so the ram contacts the work near the start of its travel. You get the full stroke as usable working travel, and you keep the ram at its shortest and stiffest extension when the load is highest — which is the position with the least tendency to deflect and skew the part off-axis.

Heavy Steel Where It Counts

The frame is heavy steel throughout. On a press, frame mass is not a marketing weight class — it is the whole safety argument. Under load, the uprights want to bow outward and the top beam wants to bend upward, and everything the press does depends on those deflections staying small and elastic. It is also why the RP-20T weighs 202 lbs (92 kg): that mass is the machine resisting itself.

Two heavy-duty arbor plates come included. They are the pieces that let you straddle a gap and press a shaft through a hub without pressing the hub into the table, and buying a press without them means buying them separately the same week.

Perfect For

• Independent repair shops pressing bearings, bushings, U-joints and races as routine work.
• Driveline and suspension specialists where ball joints and control arm bushings come through daily.
• Fabrication and restoration shops bending, straightening and flattening as well as pressing.
• Fleet and agricultural workshops that need serious force without a power supply at the machine.
• Well-equipped home garages where a press is the tool that turns a two-day parts-store job into an afternoon.

What's in the Box

• RP-20T H-frame shop press with heavy steel construction
• 20 ton bottle jack / hydraulic pump unit
• Vertically adjustable table
• Two heavy-duty arbor press plates

That is the manufacturer's stated content. Presses in this class ship partly knocked down for transport, so expect to bolt the frame together on arrival.

Specifications

Worth noting for anyone cross-checking: the tonnage and the pound rating agree with each other exactly, which is not always true of press listings.

Certification, Stated Honestly

Ranger claims no third-party safety listing or approval scheme for this press in the data we hold, and we will not imply one. Say that plainly rather than hiding it: some insurers, corporate safety policies, vocational training programs and municipal shop inspections require independently listed equipment, and a shop press is the kind of high-energy machine those policies tend to name. If you are subject to a written equipment standard, read what it actually requires before you buy, and ask us if you need help matching the wording to what this machine offers.

Shipping and Delivery

Shipped as freight within the lower 48 states, free of charge. At 202 lbs (92 kg) in a crate 61 in. long, this is not a parcel — you or someone at the delivery address must be able to receive and unload it, or arrange to collect it from the carrier's terminal instead. Deliveries to a residential address carry an additional fee, shown before you pay.

Inspect the crate before you sign. Note any damage, puncture or shifted load on the bill of lading at the moment of delivery, and photograph it while the driver is still there. Signing a clean bill and finding a bent upright afterwards makes a freight claim very hard to win, and a bent upright on a press is not something to straighten and use.

Warranty

Ranger publishes its warranty for this product as a downloadable document. That document governs the coverage, so we do not paraphrase a term here — download it from the product page and read the exclusions if warranty length is part of your decision.

If you do need to claim, do not disassemble the press or the jack first. Opening a hydraulic unit to diagnose it yourself is the most common reason a legitimate claim is refused. Photograph the fault, keep the crate if the damage looks like it happened in transit, and contact us before you take anything apart.