Storage Solution

I have had a storage problem for over a year now. You see, I bought a nice bicycle last December. It has an aluminum frame, front and rear disk brakes, indexed shifting, and stuff. I spent a decent amount on it - something like $550. A lot for a bicycle? Not really. It is on the low price scale for a high end bike. As opposed to a high price cheap bike. The next step up was almost $800.

Anyhow, for all that money there is no kick stand. Those are not manly. If you have a kick stand on your bike, other people will laugh at you. Kick stands are for cheap, low end, department store bikes.

Funny how that works huh? The less you spend on a bike, the MORE things it comes with to keep it from falling over and getting scratched. So I do not have a kick stand. And I do not want to go into the fancy bike store with the $5,000 carbon fiber super bikes (yes you still have to peddle them yourself) and ask for a non manly kick stand!

So I have been storing the bike by leaning it against stuff. There is a small storage room thing in the house that I use for this. There is a lot of crap in there to lean a bike against. What the hell is in all those boxes? I forget. It must be crap nobody needs, because nobody has gone looking through any of the boxes for anything in a long time. So if you are missing something and you can not find it - it may be in a mystery box here! Who knows!

Anyway, what I needed was a better system. Some sort of stand! A stand that supports the bike with the tires off the ground, so that I can make adjustments and stuff to it. Yea. That is what I need. A stand! A manly stand! Not some wimpy girlie non-manly kick stand thing! A storage stand that is also a repair stand, so that I can start to break stuff on the bike while trying to adjust/repair/maintain it.

So I made one. Out of 3/4 inch galvanized steel plumbing pipe. It uses screw together technology. It is strong as hell. And it only cost around $30 to construct. In theory it can be taken apart for easy transportation. It is pretty cool. I have to post photos of it sometime.

I am fairly happy with the end result. No more leaning!

Let the destruction begin!