DIY Bike Repair Stand, Phase 1

When I decided to take on the restoration of this vintage Bianchi, I quickly realized I was grossly under-equipped for the task at hand. Not only am I lacking experience in the ways of bike repair fu, but I don’t have a decent set of bike-specific tools. Nevermind the fact that I have nowhere to perch my bike while I work on it. For the tools, I realized that if I ordered a decent basic toolkit, that would get me started and that I would probably need some specialized tools to work on this old bike anyhow (which I can pick up as needed).

Which left me with the repair stand issue. I don’t have a lot of extra money laying around these days, and after researching commercial bike repair stands, quickly realized I needed to find an alternative. So I put Google to work and found an article that answered my call. I decided on a conglomeration of the various designs I came across. Tonight, I worked on the clamping mechanism, which is built using a 1 1/4″ PVC tee, a couple hinges and a hasp latch. As you can see from the photos below, the whole thing will be attached to a 1 1/4″ steel pipe that’s threaded on both ends, which will be screwed into a pipe base (also note that I have an extension for it, in the event I need more clearance). That’s as far as I got tonight. The hinges got on a little crooked and the hasp latch could use a little adjusting, but this should hold the Bianchi (and a our other bikes) in place quite well.

Next step will be to build a stand for it, as I realized I don’t have any open wall space in our garage on which to mount this. Luckily, I have a pristine 4×4 in the garage that I’ve been saving for several years “just in case.” Yay for packrat behavior rewarding. I plan to build a base for the 4×4, which I will cut down to about head height. Then I’ll lag screw the steel pipe base onto the post.

Kind of excited about this, and hope it works well. The clamp works well enough, but will be a little cumbersome to put on, I think. At any rate, more pics to follow once I get Phase II completed.