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I’ve got a very nice repair stand but I don’t seem to use it for the purpose it was intended for.
In the old days, I had this rather cheesy stand made by Minaura, that was barely capable of holding a bike aloft without falling over. Doing any serious work with this stand was somewhat problematic. Then for one Christmas I got a Park repair stand, which was a serious piece of equipment, worthy of a real bike store, and life was sweet. But being a lazy sod, half the time I decided to embark on a repair, I did so by hooking the saddle around a bit of string that was fastened to a nail in one of the rafters in the basement. That seemed to work as well as the Park stand for most repairs that didn’t involve turning the bike upside down.
The new house didn’t have a basement, and the garage was remarkably bereft of rafters. So, I figured the Park stand would have a renaissance. But it was not to be. I found that by slinging a piece of rope over one of the guides for the garage door, I could have a reasonable facsimile of the rafter/rope technique.
I really tried to use the Park stand, but I found that most of my bikes didn’t have a clampable part -- the seat tube was usually filled with water bottle cages, pumps, or what not. The seatpost, the place of choice for clamping the bike since there is no danger of scratching the frame’s paint (not a serious consideration in my case) was usually coopted by a saddle bag or some other accouterment, so in the end, I usually ended up laying the nose of the saddle on top of the stand and proceeding from there. This was considerably more shaky than even the flimsy stand, but it allowed simple repairs (as if there were such a thing) without major disassembly.
Still better than just turning the bike upside down on the floor and working on it there. Of course, the original reason why this was a no no, was in the bad old days when bikes had brake cables sticking out of the levers, this would crimp the brake cables. Now that all modern bikes had aero levers and cables routed along the bar, this is probably OK. Guess I don’t need that fancy stand after all.
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