Homemade Bike Work Stand

Perhaps our first mountain bike ride at Findlay State Park was unusually sloppy.  Still, the follow-up experience of cleaning the bikes in the front yard made me realize bike washing is no longer a basement event.  In the past, with road bikes, I always carried the bikes to the basement for cleaning and storage.  A road bike washing consisted of clamping the bike into my homemade, of course, work stand and using a spray bottle of water and old cloth diaper to wipe down the bike.  This method is obviously not going to work with muddy, knobby tired bikes.

My second homemade work stand.

After a couple times washing the mountain bike in the front yard I decided an outdoor work stand would be helpful.  It's not practical to carry the one up from the basement, as it's base consists of a 40 pound piece of steel tread plate.  What would I use for the base on an outdoor stand?  And, what style stand should I build?  I think I came up with a practical solution.

The finished work stand in action.

For the base of the stand I decided to use something solid: the Earth, what a novel idea.  I figured I'll always wash the bikes in the same spot in the front yard, near the driveway and garden hose.  Instead of moving around a heavy base or trying to make some sort of tripod base, I buried a 30" pipe into the ground.  The work stand will drop into this pipe.

The base pipe is sunk into the ground.

The workstand I built about five years ago, for use in the basement, has a clamp that holds a bike by its seat post or seat tube.  It's solid and works well, but I decided to try a different style workstand for use in the front yard, one that holds the bike with a fork lock and bottom bracket cradle.  Yes, this requires the front wheel to be removed, but I figure it will be easier to clean the front wheel and the forks of a mucked up mountain bike with the front wheel removed.

Some dumpster diving provided pipe and a tee connector, quite a bit of elbow grease was needed to clean up these pieces.  (Otherwise, a couple pieces of black iron pipe and a threaded tee from Lowes would've worked just as well.)  Next I needed attachment blocks that would clamp on the pipe and also mate to the bike.  Ideally these would be made out of aluminum, and I still may do that someday, but for now I made blocks out of some hard maple and coated them in polyurethane.  I'm sure they will hold up well enough.

Rear block that cradles the bottom bracket shell.

After a quick test to determine the final length for the horizontal pipe, I cut this pipe to length and installed the blocks.  A skewer is needed for the front block and a small piece of mouse pad material is added to the back block for gripping and padding the bike's bottom bracket.  Both blocks have a 1/4" bolt for clamping and thumb knobs for pinching the blocks securely onto the pipe.  To prevent the whole stand from rotating in the buried pipe, a small bolt is threaded into the upright pipe and a corresponding notch made in the buried pipe to capture the bolt head.

Front block with fork lock.

The stand works well.  It's nice to clean a bike standing up instead of bent over, and it's certainly easier to lubricate the chain or fiddle with derailleurs with the bike up on the stand.  After use, the stand is pulled from the pipe in the ground and hung on the garage wall for storage.  I found a plastic cap to put over the buried pipe, to keep it from filling with water or junk.  I'll call it a successful project!

Daniel tested and approved.