Bike Stand

When I was getting my workshop set up, one of the first things I knew I wanted to add to it was a bench-mounted bike repair stand. I had toyed with the idea of just buying one, but they're pretty darn expensive so the clear solution was to build. I had seen the mechanism I knew I wanted in a stand made by Park Tool, but I didn't know if I would find such a clamp for my use. Fortunately, I'm just down the street from what may be the world's finest locally and independently owned hardware store. As I've now come to expect from the excellent people at McGuckin Hardware, not only did they have the exact piece of hardware to meet my obscure need; I now know that it's called a toggle clamp and they had 6 or 8 different kinds and sizes.

I started by mounting a piece of 2" angle steel (scrap from a modification to my trailer) to the corner of my bench. To that I mounted the toggle clamp, but I had to raise it up on a little block of synthetic 2x6 so that it would accommodate the thickness of a top tube. The little rubber stopper bolt can be adjusted a bit to fit different sized tubes. To cradle the top tube below the clamp I put a half section of pipe.


This is a short galvanized steel coupler about 1 1/2" in diameter cut lengthwise with a hacksaw. The hardest part was mounting the round pipe securely to the flat bar. I put two holes through and used hardened flat-head machine screws and lock nuts. To contour the shape of the screw heads, I tried to taper the holes a little. This helped to get a tight fit, and it turned out not to be a huge deal because the stand doesn't receive much force perpendicular to the axis of the bike. Then to protect the bike from scratches I glued in a half section of thick vinyl tubing with Goop for a tough bond that could withstand some wiggling and impact.


And there's the stand with my bike

The stand works well for bikes with a standard flat top tube that have thinner tubing. My road bike has fat carbon framing and has trouble fitting into the stand. Because I ride the track bike most of the time, it's the one that mostly needs maintenance so the lack of versatility hasn't been a huge problem. I've started to think about other designs that would be more flexible but the only major change in this design would be a wider pipe to accommodate fatter tubes. There's no real danger of going too wide because as long as it's curved it will cradle a round tube. In retrospect it would have been much better to error on that side. The other design flaw I've found is the inability of the angle steel to resist torque. It doesn't make it way harder to work on the bike, but it is annoying to have it bobbing in a see-saw motion around the clamp point. I don't think that a square or round tube would have this problem. I may still reinforce the current arm with a square piece which I expect to greatly attenuate the torsional flexibility. Nonetheless, this stand has made a dramatic change in the ease with which I maintain and clean my bikes which means that I perform those tasks far more often. The materials cost me less than $20 so all things considered, it's pretty sweet.