Bored of holding bikes up with one hand while I awkwardly tighten something with my remaining hand, I decided that I really ought to make my life easier and invest in a bike stand. I didn’t really want a free standing one though; space is at a premium so I don’t really have anywhere to store one or indeed properly use it. I’ll make one then, how hard can it be?
Make is a bit of stretch here. For the actual functional clamp part I procured a Park Tools clamp; no point in remaking the wheel and anything I made would be inferior anyway. No, the part I was making was a system of attaching the clamp to a wall of my garage. In this way it can be swung out of the way when not in use, and it obviously takes up zero floor space. I also wanted some height adjustment, so what I came up with was essentially a vertical rail that screwed to the wall, and a piece that slid up and down on the rail, replicating the Park mechanism for interfacing with the clamp. In order to do this I needed to take a notch out of a tube, so I make a simple jig out of pine to guide a holesaw.
To get the square section clamp tubes a close fit I needed another jig.
With all the pieces cut to size I clamped them all together and (pretty amateur) welding could begin.
And here’s the finished product. There’s a bit more to it than what I’ve shown, to be honest. There is a safety catch plate that goes in the clamp interface that I never took any photos of. Also, the clamp needed a small shim wrapped around it as I couldn’t get tubing with the perfect internal diameter. I might come back to this in future as it has a habit of binding up, and I think the shim is too thin anyway. It needs a slightly bigger shim and for that to be carefully welded in place so it can’t rotate.
At the end of the day, it does its job pretty well. I use the height adjustment quite a lot, depending on what I’m working on. Having it has made bike maintenance so much easier, particularly anything involving turning the wheels.
As designed, when not in use it folds neatly away into the wall. In retrospect it’s rather overbuilt – I could probably comfortably hang my entire body weight off it. Better overbuilt than underbuilt though.
