Building Your Own Mountain Bike Workshop at Home
Transform Your Space into a Cyclist's Paradise
Is there anything more DIY than making yourself a bike repairing workshop at home? A good bike work corner makes cleaning, maintaining, and repairing your bike exponentially easier. Let’s go through the main and crucial elements that will make your project successful.
Build a bike stand
Working on your bike at home is made a lot easier with a bike stand and there’s a reason no serious workshop is complete without a bike stand: undertaking even simple jobs is made much harder without one.
The main thing you should consider before thinking about which stands suites the most for you is the amount of space you have available. This consideration will lead your choice between a foldable and fixed stand.
The former are lightweight, usually cheaper, and appropriate for the majority of bikes, these stands will help you in clamping the bike via the top tube or seat post.
The latter – for those of you are lucky enough to have a dedicated ‘bike room’ – come with a heavy solid base which is not designed to be moved around or folded at the end of the job. This makes it easier to loosen tight bolts such as those on bottom brackets.
Please always consider these elements when going for a stand: clamping adjustment options, strong clamps availability, folding size (if needed), height adjustment opportunity, maximum weight.
Making the workbench
When fixing your bike or a component of it very often you’ll need a good spot where to lean on. Let’s imagine for example you are working on the chain, carrying out a technical operation on a pinion or even only immersing the tube in a water washtub looking for the bubbles: having a flat, raised surface is blessing for work quality (as well as a panacea for your back pain).
First, in order to choose the right workbench you should start by listing your needs. You will mainly work on medium sized component (the frame can be managed with the stand) so the surface required shouldn’t be that wide. Same consideration can be right for the weight your workbench has to withstand: no heavy parts are supposed to be sustained and this means a medium resistance structure will be enough.
Second, which crucial elements a bike fixing workbench can’t miss? In order to complete your bike-workbench a vice is surely required as well as plenty of space for your tools. Screwdrivers, pinches, chisels and many more tools can be either stored in a dedicated draw (most of available workbenches include it by default) or hung from storage shelves.
To sum up: a medium sized workbench is what you are looking for, mechanics’ ones are perfect. If you don’t have enough space – or you are passionate about moving things around often – you can always look for a foldable solution.
ENJOY OPERATIONS IN YOUR HOME WORKSHOP
Popular Product for Bike Maintenance
Benefit from a multipurpose tool
Doing bike maintenance as well as tuning implies lot of different operations and having all the tools available can consist of money spent and time to gather them all. You would bear in mind there is a shortcut to avoid such a problem: make yourself available with an air compressor! You will be able to inflate tyres, clean and blow components, sand and paint the frame. The problems you will sort out are several and last but not least, you will also make your workbench shining clean easily after every fixing session.
Market offers several solutions tailored to your needs. If you already know your own bike won’t be the only one to take care of – other members of the family are always claiming little businesses for their rides – would be smart to provide yourself with a compressor able to deliver a good amount of air. In this sense a hobbyist machine with an air storage between 10 and 30 litres can be perfect. If you are looking for something easy-to-use and maintenance-free a compact air compressor is the best choice. Special designed compressor will solve not only the “learn about” step (plug-and-play solution) but also the “where to place” pattern. Indeed, these small-sized machines can be mounted on a wall – making you save lot of space – or moved easily thank to wheels and lightweight configurations.
Aka: a small laboratory as well as a narrow basement are homeland for an air compressor. Think about that, just a small investment you’ll soon have great benefit from.
