Too Many Shiny Things

So I was doing a little tune up on my bike and was fumbling around trying to turn the crank with one hand and hold the rear wheel off the ground with the other, and I finally just got fed up. I needed a stand to work on my bikes with. A little looking around told me that nearly all the “nice” bike stands were at least $150, and even the crappy ones were around $50. Well I figured that I could certainly spend $20 bucks and make some thing as good as a crappy stand. So I zipped down to my local home improvement store and picked up a few bits and pieces.

I ended up spending $12.78 and came out with a pretty decent repair stand if you happen to still have a couple of clamps and a post to clamp to.

I picked up:
• 3/4″ threaded pipe base
• 3/4″ x 10″ threaded pipe
• 3/4″ ->1.75″ PVC Expander
• 1.75″ PVC T-joint
• 2 x Small hinges
• 2 x 1.75″ Pipe Clamps

Assembly is pretty self-evident. Thread everything together screw the base to a decent chunk of wood laying around your garage, and use the clamps to secure it to a post. You could certainly screw the base directly to the post, but I wanted to be able to move my unit around a bit depending on which cars were in the garage and so forth. The integral part of the stand is the PVC T-Joint, which you saw in half to create a clamp. I lined mine with some pip insulation and instead of using the cheapo draw clasps they had at the store I opted for some hose clamps. I expoyed those to the joint (now clamp) so that I didn’t have to funmple around to much with tring to get the clamp closed.