Coat Rack From Bicycle Parts!

I work at a community bike shop on Sundays and Mondays. It's a lot of fun, but with all the cold weather we had a problem. We were in desperate need of a coat rack. Mainly because we wanted to sit down every once in a while, and all the chairs were piled high with coats.
Meanwhile there were scrap bike frames- bent, broken, and unusable- piling up in the corner. We needed a solution, lest we all go crazy.
We were saving the the bike frames for tall bikes and other cool projects. Then it occurred to us, other cool projects! That could include a coat rack.

What follows is the sort-of documentation of what we did, and how you can make your own awesome coat rack from bike bits.

If you attempt this please use bike parts that nobody is going to use, or we will be sad.

Also, if you happen to live in Boone, then come get a bike, they're piling up and now's the time to get 'em!

PLEASE NOTE: I had a terribly hard time taking pictures that did this thing justice, and the pictures that captured it better are still on Quints camera. Please message Quint and tell him to give pictures to me.

It's not that hard, you just need a pile of bike parts that no one will be using. Be sure to double check, triple check, and even call someone in charge to make sure no one will be upset that you used a certain bike part.
Better to ask a question six or seven times than use the wrong parts and get asked to leave the shop, and never come back, because you just welded parts from Quints brand new 2-stroke engine.

We used:

-Random sections of pipe

-An old huffy frame

-An old wheel

-Water bottle mounts

-Washers (tiny ones)

-Handle bar ends? (those funny things that stick up, that we never put back on the bikes...)

This is where you look at your pile of junk and decide what shape your coat rack is going to be.

Grind off anything that doesn't look like a coat rack.

If you break a cutting wheel, buy a new one.

The grinder belongs to Quint. Quint, your stuff is all over the table. Quint, we will use your welder, we will use your grinder, we will use your tools, as long as they're here. Quint, you have a house and yet you leave your tools here. Quint, we love ya man.


We also pulled the part of the frame we used wider, to create a tripod.

When this fails, find someone who knows how to weld and trick them into doing all the work for you. People who know what they're doing know what they're doing, so let them decide where to put extra support, etc.
Super Nathan can weld, so I made him teach me. After my earlier attempts, that is. With Super's instruction and help we got some good welds, although I don't think you can see that in the pictures.

Be sure to make your welds strong enough to hold a good number of coats. It would suck to make a rack that breaks while everyone is admiring your innovation.

Don't weld galvanized, like I did. That's bad, and might kill you, apparently.

Go to this guide for more instructables on welding.

Our rack is pretty simple: big pipe welded to tripod, smaller pipe welded to wheel, smaller pipe fits inside the bigger pipe.

Well, with our super-uber-simple system the big pipe ends up rubbing against the spokes, and that's bad. They'd break in a few days, since the whole thing spins on an axis. So, we made a bearing for it. We made it from a degreaser cap, which is pretty ridiculous, and will eventually get replaced with something more ridiculous. You can, however, put more thought and time into this part of things that I did.
We also put a buncha lube on it, with hopes that that will prolong the life of our lazy craftsmanship.

That's it, and now we hang coats on it all the time.

It's not actually too bad, as far as balance. As long as we don't hang all the coats from the same hook it doesn't tip over.

Post pictures if you make one, and send quint a message nagging him about MY pictures. =D