Project: bike rack

After two years of thinking about it, two months of procrastinating doing anything with it, and two weeks of building it, my bike rack is done. Now I can store up to five bikes in one corner of my apartment. Also, I proved that I can make something useful out of real materials, not just out of abstract sequences of 1's and 0's.

The rack is of my own design and meets the following requirements:

• The rack shall stand freely—no holes in any walls, no leaning against the wall.
• The rack shall be compact and fit within a corner of my apartment. (Actual dimensions: 3ft x 4ft x 8ft)
• The rack shall be capable of being taken apart and put back together.

Of course, there are the obvious requirements, too, such as not crumpling and thus not damaging a few thousands dollars worth of bikes.

Overall, the rack works well. The bikes are staggered in height so that five bikes fit in four feet of width. Getting a bike in and out of the rack is no harder than what I did before having the rack, which entailed maneuvering bikes stacked against each other, all leaning against a wall. Now, with the rack, I can retrieve any one bike irrespective of the others.

There's a problem with the rack, however, and that's that it leans. This is because the combined weight of the bicycles—100 to 150 pounds when the rack is fully loaded—pulls the rack forward. The five vertical, weight-bearing 2x4's bend under that forward pull. But the rack feels sturdy, so I think this is only a cosmetic issue. As far as I can tell, any alternative design that wouldn't lean and would fulfill the freestanding requirement would require more wood—more joints, more nuts and bolts, more work. Possibly I would have been better off designing the rack to lean against the wall. However, the best solution, for those who own the walls they live in, is to drill the bike-hanging hooks directly into the wall's studs and be done with it.

But I'm happy with the rack. I could have bought something pre-made and machine-precise, and maybe that would have been cheaper and certainly it would have been easier, but if I had pursued that route I wouldn't have learned as much as I did making my rack.