Just got a bicycle stand from EZ Bike Products to review. Here’s the quick and dirty on it–if you’ve taken to leaning your bike against the wall of your garage, your car, boxes, strollers, piles of junk, having your kid hold it, etc., and you keep thinking “Man, I just need somewhere to put this where it won’t fall over or be in the way” then the EZ Bike Stand is great.
Like a paper clip, there isn’t much to this product, and you’re just happy when it lives up to its claim, which is to hold your bike steady without doing any damage to it. The bike stand does the job of holding your bike steady because it’s a bit weighty. Weightier than it looks, in fact. I actually dropped it while I was taking it out of the box it was shipped in because I didn’t grip it firmly enough and in trying to catch it ended up skinning one of my fingers, which means I’m probably one of the first people in the world to get injured handling one of these.
Set up was a breeze. There are two large plastic parts that slide together, you hit them with a hammer to get them to stay together (Note: You’ll need to do this on a hard surface that won’t be damaged, such as concrete. I wouldn’t do this on a wood floor, and it didn’t work for me on the carpet in my office), and then you can adjust the tightness by sliding them and tightening the clamp.
It took me a little adjusting to get the tightness just right for my bike, but once I did that was it. The wheel slides in with a satisfying “thwuump” and the bike holds steady. The bike stand does not touch the spokes, as promised, only the tire and rim where it doesn’t do any damage.
I didn’t test this out in any high winds or anything, so I’m not sure what it would take to blow the bike over, but I suspect due to the weight and width of the base that it would take quite a bit.
In checking out EZ Bike Products’ Facebook page, I noticed there are some other uses for the bike stand that I hadn’t thought of, and apparently the manufacturer hadn’t thought of either. How many times have you taken the front wheel off your bike, and you’re holding the front of your bike off the ground with your left hand, your wheel in your right hand, and you’re thinking “Ok, I need to set this bike down but I don’t want to scrape my fork on the ground…” Well, you can put those forks on the stand as shown below. It’s not terribly stable that way, and the stand isn’t meant for this kind of use, but it’s no more unstable than the bare ground and won’t scratch anything up.
Bottom line–it does what it says, and a bit more, and I have no complaints and am happy to be at an end of my “just lean that against anything” days.
Room for Improvement
I do think there are two improvements that could be made to the EZ bike stand:
1. Portability – The bike stand doesn’t fold or anything, so while it’s no great challenge to pack, it could be easier. Maybe if the upper parts somehow disconnected from the base…well, I’m not sure of the exact engineering that would make it happen, all I know is that it would be nice if it could all be made flat somehow without compromising the other useful aspects of the product.
2. Tension adjustment – In order to adjust how tight the bike stand is, you have to unscrew the clamp, adjust the base by sliding the two pieces, and then rescrew the clamp. It would be nice if the clamp itself tightened and untightened things by itself. Again, I don’t have detailed suggestions, and maybe the manufacturer has already thought through this and he would have to compromise in other areas to make this work, but it would be nice.
