Bike Rack Overview

This video is to give you an introduction to the Bike Rack project

which is one of five projects that are part of this course. I designed and built this back in 2008 for Canadian Home Workshop magazine

so it's a published project. As far as I know, the design is unique

It's quite simple, but it's very strong, and it can accommodate as many bikes as you like

depending on how long you make it. So the top and bottom bars, horizontal bars

are inch and a quarter steel pipe, and the vertical bars are three-quarter inch steel pipe

So, widely available stuff, and essentially the trick of the project is how the pieces of pipe are held at the appropriate distance

in a kind of temporary wooden form. So, that's what you're going to see

when I show you a tour of the plans, coming right up

You can print these plans from the course interface, and I recommend you do that

so you have something in your shop that you can work to. But notice first here these temporary wooden jigs

It doesn't really matter what you make them out of, just scrap plywood or wafer board or anything like that

but the purpose of these jigs is to hold the horizontal pipes the right distance apart here

and the right distance apart in this direction. And the vertical bars are then meant to fit between the horizontal ones

So, if you look down here, you'll see I have specified lengths for these different parts

but you can take those numbers with a grain of salt, because, for instance, you can make the rack longer than 86 inches

if you want to accommodate more bicycles. And this distance here, 28 and a quarter inches

I mean, that's theoretically correct, but you really don't want to just go by that number

What you really want is for your vertical pipes to fit nicely

between the bottom horizontal pipe and the top horizontal pipe. That's the main thing

Now, over here, what's going on is there's some magnetic clamps, which I have covered earlier in the course

They attach to, they hold on to this piece of pipe here

and in this case, this upright pipe here. And it holds that upright pipe temporarily in position

where you want it to be. Now, this thing in the middle here, this is a two-foot level

and it just so happens that the width of normal two-foot levels

is perfect for the amount of space you need to leave for the bicycle tire

So the level functions as a spacer. In this case, it's two and a half inches apart

so that's a good distance for the two verticals. But because it's a level, you can see whether the whole contraption is level

the whole pair of pipes is level, or plumb, rather. So you start by setting up the horizontal pipes so that they are level

And you might have to shim one end or the other, depending on how level your floor is

But when the horizontal pipes are level, and the vertical pipes are also plumb

then you can be assured that they're meeting each other at 90 degrees. And that's essentially what you want to do

So this quick-grip clamp holds the pipes and the level as one unit

and the magnetic clamps hold that unit into position on the main horizontal pipes

And then it's just a matter of tack welding here and here and here and here

Not full welding, because that would overheat the magnetic clamps, but just a tack weld, just enough to hold things in place

And then you take it all down. And actually, in my case, what I did was I tacked them all

and then I removed the wooden jigs and laid the rack down horizontally

And then I just did all the full weldings, first on one side, then the other

It works out quite well that way. So here I am doing some practice welds

I really recommend this. It lets you set up your welder properly

and also just get some hand-eye coordination practice. So you can see here there's the magnetic clamp

It's holding this little scrap of pipe in place so I can do some tack welding

And then, as you can see over here, some final welding, just so that by the time I turn to the actual rack I'm not going to be messing anything up

I should mention, too, that the pipe you see here is galvanized steel

So that means there's a zinc coating on the outside. And you can weld this pipe just fine

but the heat causes the zinc to vaporize off in a kind of a smoke

That smoke's not good for you, so you should do this welding outdoors if you're using galvanized pipe

You don't really have to because regular black iron pipe, so un-galvanized rustable pipe, in other words, it can rust

is an option and it doesn't give off those zinc fumes. I have painted the project

which you do not have to do if it's entirely galvanized, but you certainly do want to do that if it's plain steel

And just to finish up here you can see a close-up view of the welds

You can see the penetration there. The welds are pretty neat, and the whole thing's painted

and ready to go with a bike in place