I was sick of spare wheels cluttering up the place, so I knocked up a wheel rack out of spare handlebars. (@gcntweet #hackorbodge) pic.twitter.com/ZU3ymoQ4Vr
— The Crankset Blog (@thecrankset) January 28, 2017
My house is not large, but it’s dominated by two things. Things that will be obvious when you walk through the door.
The main one is bikes.
Followed closely by guitars.
But mainly bikes.
There are bikes and bike components all over the place. There are at least four complete bikes, two bare frames (one broken, one waiting for a rebuild). There’s a large set of shelves full of random components like cassettes, stems, seatmast caps, seatpins and saddles. There are a couple of packing crates full of old cranksets and derailleurs. There are tools everywhere. Plus workstands, turbo trainers, rollers, bottles and all the other ephemera of the mid-life cyclist.
So I decided to fix the problem, using the problem.
The wheel rack you see above is the beta version of what I think will become a permanent fixture. A means of hanging spare wheels up off the floor, to stop them being leaned on my sofa or left in the middle of my coffee table, or cluttering the bottom of the stairs. It consists of:
- One set of 90s-era Club Roost IDB150 mountain bike handlebars
- One set of more recent RaceFace NextSL carbon-fibre MTB bars (slightly too narrow for a modern 29er, so retired)
- One Scor (BMC components) short MTB stem. Too short for a tall bloke’s XC bike, so retired.
- One pair of 90s-era X-Lite stubby pro bar ends.
- One rubber shim, nicked from a light mounting kit, so that the Club Roost bars fit the steerer end of the stem
- A wooden backing plate, nicked from a cider crate
- A couple of zip ties
- Some woodworking clamps
The clamps and wooden backing plate allow me to temporarily fix this to the steel beams in my house’s frame*. The zip ties hold the ClubRoost bars to the backing plate.
The eventual design will be to fix the stem directly onto the backing plate, so the other bars aren’t needed and can be re-used to make a second rack, and the woodworking clamps will be replaced with a backing board and picture frame, which will be fixed more permanently to the wall. For now, this allows me to try out whether it’s actually a useful rack or not.
* I live in a converted warehouse, which was once a piano key factory. It’s basically a steel shed converted into a large (ish), open, somewhat bohemian living space. I can literally ride a bike around the living room. When I clear up the bike parts and guitars, that is.
The guitars live on the stage.
Yes, I have a stage.
