Bicycle Hoist or "How to get the wife's bike out of my way"

Step 4 Bike Hooks and Pulleys

OK - here is the somewhat tricky part.

If you want to do it the easy way (but more work to hook up the bike) - just attach some of those cheap carabiners from the hardware store and use a loop of rope to attach to the bike. This requires you to know how to tie a real knot, which i will let you look up elsewhere.

I started out by making some simple hooks from those ubiquitous organizer threaded hooks. I ground off most of the threads with my grinder, (making sure it would fit into the eye of the pulley, and then bent a loop on one end using my little propane torch. these worked ok, but lacked the geometry to pull straight up. see the sketch for what i mean. what you want is a "S" style hook that has the hanging point directly beneath the holding point. The yellow ones I show here cocked sideways when you lifted the bike.

For the front bar hook, you want something that will hook around the stem of the handle bars and come back up on both sides. I made one out of 3/8" aluminum stock (again, Home Depot - $4 worth did two). You don't need to heat aluminum stock to bend it. my "S" was offset to compensate for not having swivel hooks.

If you don't get it right, just play with the angles and such until it works.

On the rear end of the bike, I ran out of time and ended up using a carabiner and rope loop. I may update this with a better version though... or take suggestions. I did not want the hook to grab the back of the seat because of the way this bike was made with springs and such. Other bikes you could just snag the back of the seat with the hook.