Outdoor Bike Rack

Living by the beach, you depend on your bicycle as more or less your main mode of transportation. Whether it be shopping for groceries, traveling to bars, or visiting friends, its nice to be able to keep your bike in an accessible location. Usually that means somewhere in the garage, behind cars or in some other spot that ends up making actually getting to the bike too much of a hassle. No more! Outside the front of the house, there's a small plot of dirt that wasn't being used for anything. I thought that this would be perfect to build a permanent, hefty outdoor bike rack. There were a few bike racks here on Instructables, but they were meant to be more light, temporary and portable structures. The bike rack detailed here could withstand Katrina!

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Step 1: Parts

On to the parts list.
For my purposes, it sufficed to have 1/2" steel pipes as the main structure. Make sure that you get galvanized pipes so that they don't rust from being outside!

Purchased Items:

Five 36" long 1/2" steel pipes with threaded ends
Four 9" long 1/2" steel pipes with threaded ends
Five 1/2" 90 degree threaded elbow joints
Three 1/2" threaded tee joints
7 bags of Quick-crete Cement

total ~ $50

Other items:

shovel
gloves
bucket
level
duct tape
garden hose
rag
gravel smoothing paddle (i'm sure it has a real name..)
a few spare bricks

In addition, I had played around with cement before, and it was a PAIN to mix by hand. For this project, I went ahead and rented an electric cement mixer. It came to about $40 for the whole day, and that was well worth the saved time and energy.

Hycro says: Sep 24, 2009. 4:47 AM

It looks nice, though I'm partial to painting things black...my bike was a grey/black two tone when I bought it, then once the store's return warranty (30 days, since it was what I call a "Walmart Bike", one of those $100 jobs, though it's fared quite well, though the fork I put in it not long after I got it was a bit wore out from the previous owner, and the alloy rims that came with it were garbage...the first flat I got with it, involved me changing the back rim too, and that was pushing it only about a kilometre (a little more than half a mile) to where I was staying the night...and under the bike's own weight it totalled the rim, there was no way I could get a tire bead to stay in the grooves it was so mangled...and I think the tube caught onto the freewheel while I was pushing it and stopped the whole thing dead, grinding a big flat spot in the rim...after that, I went to my trusty steel rims, the fact that they're heavier gave it more vertical stability at high speeds (centrifugal forces at work:P) But now that I'm rebuilding it, I've decided to put half decent aluminum alloy rims on it, see if I can boost my over all speed by shaving a few pounds off it, changing my pedal arms to aluminum as well, and my stem, and the fork I'm using now is threadless, so I can't use my one-piece bar/stem combo that has a triangular space on it that I had my air horn's pressure gauge mounted into...)

Hycro says: Sep 24, 2009. 4:39 AM

Working for Wilcraft, when patching the small holes where the jackhammers punched through the bridges/overpasses, we used a really quick dry cement, called Rapidcrete, and we'd mix it into kind of like a putty/clay and push it into the small holes...it would be dry enough to walk on/park a bike on in a few hours...although, it's probably got some disadvantages where it's so quick setting, and during curing, it gives off little or no heat (unlike fibreglass body fill...which gives of enough heat you could almost burn yourself, depending on the amount that's curing...) so there must be something (I'm assuming though) that's a trade-off...probably not as much strength as regular cement, though it didn't need to be super strong, since it was going to have several inches of road concrete on top of it...that stuff was so hard, that when we went to the second lane, and sawcut the edges of the patches from the first lane, the chunks we hammered out were small and sharp (although, one feller managed to get a few larger chunks out with one of our older jackhammers) I don't know all the specs on the stuff, since I was a mere rubble man, and only really there for that project, as I didn't have any transportation to any different sites...it was a pretty good job though, $12 an hour, for unskilled, untrained labour, and only having a high school diploma (to do the work, for the most part that wasn't required, but to be hired, you needed it...) Alas, having a car would've helped me keep that job...I was hoping they'd redo the bridge that's like a 10 minute bike ride from my home (5 min by car, at about 80Km/h, about 50Mph...) then I could drive my bike to work, leaving at 6:30am to be to work before 7:00am...it may be a little chilly when November comes around, being out at that hour biking...though it don't take me long to get my temperature up, as long as I can keep the cold air from blowing under my clothing...

Hycro says: Sep 24, 2009. 4:16 AM

When I was working with Wilcraft Concrete Services Ltd. the foreman would always refer to it as a trowel, and that even covered the piece of two-by-four that had a couple handles very shakily nailed onto it...don't know if that helps ya out any, but it might help you figure out the name of it...unless you figured it out already...Lol...

D.L.H. says: Aug 15, 2009. 9:53 AM

This is cool.

Seppuko says: Sep 4, 2008. 8:54 PM

This is awesome, I bought the parts for this (four bars instead of 5, though) and I'm gonna put it in some time next week.

gurban says: Jun 5, 2007. 12:09 PM

Clean and direct, perfect for application. I used some galvi pipe for an outdoor table and I'll give everyone a heads up. If left uncovered, the threads will begin rusting. When the threads are cut at the factory, the protective layer is compromised. To combat this, on my next project I used some grease on the threads, however spraypaint or clearcoat for metal would work well too.