The Project

The concept is simple - make a home made work stand that I can mount my bike on to have it at the right height for when I clean the bike and when I want to do any maintenance on it. The key points are that it has to be easy and simple so that anyone can make it and it had to be cheap! I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do, but I needed help in actually making it happen and I knew the staff at Bunnings would be able to help.

I began by giving Abbotsford Cycles a call and seeing if they had any crappy old quick release skewered hubs. I knew that I could get a proper QR skewered mount, like the kind used on roof racks or utes for $50, but that didn't really fit into the cheap part of this project. Abbotsford Cycles had an old QR hub and skewer, so after work yesterday I stopped past and got what I needed for only $12! BARGAIN!

Once I had ridden home and showered I then went to Bunnings. I ended up spending 1 1/2 hrs there and I had 5-6 different staff members help me at different times with different things and even a customer, who was a biomechanical engineer, offered some input.

Whenever someone new helped me I told them that I was wanting to make a bike stand for my bike with the following: Minimum length of 65cm (the length between the front forks and the rear of the bottom bracket), no wider than 8cm (the gap between the smallest chain ring and the crank on the other side) and I needed a clearance of at least 15.5cm to be able to spin the cranks. A few of them struggled with the concept to begin with, but they soon caught on and were extremely helpful.

The first thing I needed to get was a foldable workhorse. It was important that the legs could fold down so it made storage easier. The only problem with this was that the workhorse was 9cm wide and didn't provide the 15.5cm clearance for the cranks that I needed due to the legs - I figured I could move the legs, but that didn't solve the problem of it being too wide for the space between my triple chain ring and opposite crank (a double chain ring might not have this problem though).

Some of the idea's that were bounced around were making the concept of an easy to make at home workstand not so easy. Ranging from attaching a metal pole at the rear of the work horse and then getting a bracket machined so that it was smooth to hold the bottom bracket. Another idea was to nail a bit of wood at the back of the work horse, like the pole idea, and then attach a hook of some kind to it which I could then rest one of the chain stay's on and cover the hook in felt so that the metal wasn't in direct contact with the bike - these idea's were all too complicated and sounded pricey - the two things I wanted to avoid!

In the end I went with my own idea of getting bits of wood that were the required width and then getting them cut the required length so that I could stack them on top of each other to make to then make it the required height I needed. I ended up getting 5 bits of wood, 700mm long with the dimension of 70x40mm.

I then needed to find a way of securely attaching the hub to the wood. Once I had again explained the concept to the guy, he came up with the suggestion of using a conduit mounting saddle. He showed me on the wall of the building what they were and it looked like a great idea.

Last but not least I then needed to get the screws (I nearly forgot these -oops-) to be able to join the wood together and to join it to the work horse - oh and to also screw the mounting saddles down.

This morning I called my sister and organised for me to go over there to assemble everything - I needed to use their drill as I don't have one. I packed the car up with everything that I had purchased, as well as the bike, and off I went.

Once I got there we got everything together in the back yard and got to work. It was actually a lot easier putting it all together than I thought it would be. I measured up the work horse so that the wood would be in the middle of it and then off we went screwing the bits of wood on top of each other. I purchased 5 bits of wood, but I realised that I only needed 4 as I wasn't taking into account the height of the wood on the work horse itself. Once we had screwed 4 bits of pine on, I put the bike on there to make sure that the cranks had the clearance needed and they did so I didn't need that extra bit of pine.

The next bit was to secure the hub to the wood. My BIL reckoned I would only need one of the mounting saddles, so we screwed it all in place with only one of them, but this didn't work. It was too loose and wasn't secure, the bike could have easily fallen off and who knows what could happen to it if that happened. We unscrewed it and then re-screwed it on with the other mounting saddle and this proved to be very secure and exactly what was needed - like I had come up with in the first place.

All up I spent the following:
1 x Quick Release Skewered hub = $12.00
2 x Conduit Mounting Saddles @ $0.57 = $1.14
2 x Packets of chipboard screws @ $2.95 = $5.90
1 x Saw horse = $19.80 (most expensive item)
5 x Pine wood 700x70x40mm = $6.30

Total money spent - $45.14, time to assemble it all 10 minutes max, making your own home made bicycle work stand - priceless :D

The stand I have made definitely fits into the category of cheap and easy to make that anyone could do - I love it! :D

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