Cheap mobility around the shop, Harbor Freight synergy.

With my most recent motorcycle sale, I am down to N (# of bikes in the garage) = 2. To make the best use of the voluminous shop space at my disposal with the TX's vacancy, I needed a way to easily move the race Ninja around. I had been storing the TX on one of Harbor Freight's motorcycle dollies. It is now free to use for the Ninja except that the Ninja is missing its kickstand and center stand since I removed them while doing race preps. See below for how I managed to (try and) solve this problem by blatantly copying an idea from a magazine.

The synergy I speak of in this post's title comes from taking two Harbor Freight products and combining them into one master stroke of genius. The idea is to take the cheap ($12.99 on sale minus an additional 20% at the time of this post) motorcycle wheel chock and combine it with the motorcycle dolly to have the Ninja upright and easily mobile. I saw this idea in a recent issue of Roadracing World magazine. It was in a new product review they had for the Condor Garage Dolly. I loved the idea, but the ridiculous $444 price tag wasn't going to fly. Especially since I already had a dolly that only cost me $72 when I got it (again with a 20% off coupon).

I measured the chock at the store with one of HF's very own tape measures off the shelf. I had previously measured the inner dimensions of the dolly's rail and found them to be a perfect fit. I then marked the mounting holes from the chock onto the bottom of the dolly.

Nothing special with this picture. I drilled the holes after checking the marks to ensure they were in the right spot. Most of my small drill bits are a bit dull from drilling all of the bolts for safety wire on the Ninja so it took a bit of pressure with the drill. The holes lined up, but I had to search for bolts long enough to go through the chock and the dolly.

Here it is all bolted up and actually pretty secure. It fit well with no issues even if the bolts were just a bit short. The chock is not heavy wall tubing and did flatten out a touch when I tightened the bolts down snug. As soon as I had the metal chips swept up (I've got to watch out for things getting into my tires) I moved the Ninja up onto the dolly and into the chock. It didn't quite work. The Ninja's front tire is very narrow and the chock doesn't want to hold the bike up by friction. I would need another person to tie the bike down and that is not the point of doing this. I will have a think to try and come up with a solution. Harbor Freight has another chock the locks the front wheel in place that might work if it can fit it between the rails of the dolly.

This is the second recent project that didn't go as planned. Oh well, a bad day in the shop isn't really a bad day after all. Come back again for an update once I get this thing figured out.

Blue