I’ve been wanting a bike repair stand since I’ve gotten more into mountain biking. Makes no sense to send the bike off to the bike shop each time it needs some adjustments done, or even if it needs some more in depth service. The thing that is annoying is that a decent repair stand is $150 or so. Anything cheaper then that, and the clamp is going to suck and its going to be very unstable. Its not that I’m too cheap to spend $150, quite the contrary but its just a few pieces of metal and a clamp, and I’ve been itching to play with my welder anyways.

I got inspiration and the clamp design from Jake Khuon and his DIY repair stand but decided to change the stand part of it, as I have a welder and have been itching to use it. Instead of using a mounting flange and a big piece of wood, I used 2 45 degree bends and a T to make the feet for my stand. Ends up functioning just like the expensive store bought stands. Since everything is screwed together, I needed to make sure the T fitting didn’t rotate with the 45 degree fittings, as that is the main base of my stand. Here is where the welder came in. If you don’t have access to a welder, I bet that gooping JB weld onto the threads and all over that fitting would do the trick as well. I used some old radiator hose I had laying around to make the cushion for the seat post (instead of inner tube like Jake), as well as on the bottom of the stand to cushion it off the floor for stability. All I have left is to spray some flat black paint all over it, but I’ll do that when its sunny and nice outside one weekend.

Edit: I ended up using a piece of pipe and a rubber hose to make the clamp instead of the wood in the pictures. The wood was just ghetto, and the welded on piece of pipe functions perfectly, and I really like it. After using it for a while, I like my stand better then even the $150 stands, as it’s super stable. As stable as the bigass bike shop permanent stands.

I practiced some welds on pieces of scrap metal and then got to work on my pipe fittings. The welds came out pretty good. I haven’t bought the gas setup yet, so I was using Flux wire, which usually makes pretty ugly welds, but I was able to get some decent beads layed down. I’m looking forward to getting the gas setup and using the regular wire to get cleaner welds. Then it will be on to project #2 and #3, the fire system install in the race car, and a tire rack for my trailer.

The bike in the pics below is my old one, the new Trek is all packed up in the car ready for its night ride tomorrow, so I didn’t feel like busting it out just to get pics. I didn’t want to have my new $2k bike hanging on the bike rack in the work parking lot, so I took the wheels off and put it in the hatch. I’ll take some later once I get it dirty

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• View the pictures using a Picasa slideshow instead

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 11:56 pm and is filed under All, Biking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.