Tuesday, June 13, 2006

A couple more points on the workstand

I had a few nice comments about the stand, thanks for that. I like comments, It makes me feel as though someone is actually reading this. I promised another picture with the bike on the stand so here it is. Something I neglected to mention is; I made a mistake when cutting the top board. The top should be 78" long and I cut mine to 72". The difference would hang over the end and allow the front wheel to be more or less centered over the front vertical board. You can see from the (blurry) photo that I've got plenty of room left at the rear for the Honda. For the record the bike in the pic is a 77' Honda CB550 with a wheelbase of 54", give or take. If you have a very long bike or very heavy bike (read: Harley chopper) you may want to consider forgoing the homebuilt wood stand and spring for the steel jack type deal. Another point is this particular stand cost me around $100.00 to build. That's not a bad price for a stand that I built on the basis of it lasting for the rest of my life. I made the wheel stop from a piece of 4" channel that I cut and welded in my Dad's shop. I realize many of my readers may not have the luxury of access to a sweet-ass weld shop with an ironworker so you may also want to source a wheel stop such as the wheel chocks sold by Pingel. All the other hardware I purchased from Menard's or I had it laying around from previous projects. Today I pushed the bike up on the stand by myself and I tell you this dear reader: Don't put your bike on the stand without help! It can be done but after I did it I said to myself, "That was stupid". The standard human being only having two hands is just unequipped to do this safely. O.K., with the mini-bike or the moped maybe, but I'm guessing with a behemoth of a bike like Gymi's big Zed or the Uncle's Connie coupled with some arm pump and fatigue after a long ride and you'd find yourself on your back in the garage under your motorcycle. That would be bad. To wrap this up, I also painted the stand with some oil based glossy machine grey to assist in spill clean-up and give the stickers something to stick to. The shelf underneath is something I added but there is enough leftover wood to do it so you don't have to buy extra. There you go, I hope if you build one you dig it. Oh yeah, don't sue me if you do build one and domething bad happens, I'm just showing you my stand not suggesting you build one.
It really does put the scooter at a nice level to work on it. I almost want to work on it now.
Rock on.

2 comments:

Gymi said...

That stand turned out bitchin' Surly. I'm going to have to look into builing one for myself.It would be nice to stop doing all that laying on the floor. The Zed is famous for falling off it's side stand so I always have someone around to act as a stabilizer when I am wrenching on it. Although I have access to a couple of pretty sharp personal injury lawyers, I won't sic 'em on ya when I build my screwed up version of the stand. I take full responsibility ;)

Anonymous said...

Excellent site. Been wondering how I was going to recreate the ramp/bench that was in out shop in the late sixties. Thanks Estimado