Mountain Bike Gear Station with Integrated Charging for Bike Lights

Here at Berm Peak, the garage is the heart of everything, but what you don't see as much in these videos is that this garage is as much an office as it is a shop. That's why we put so much emphasis on keeping it organized. When every tool,

bike

, and piece of equipment has a home, it's a more pleasant and less distracting workplace. But this space is not finished yet. Our photography

gear

is organized chaos at best, and the

bike

gear

section is a haven for wolf spiders. I intended to address these two sections, but now is not the time to “intend to address” anything.

In a week, this garage will be part of a documentary series that I will announce later. Although a workspace is never truly finished, it would be nice to clear out all pending projects before documentation takes place, so that's what we're doing today. I'm putting Curtis in charge of the camera crew. Building the woodworking shop freed up a ton of space in our rolling toolbox, so he's going to dismantle this while I work on something else. The gear section. In a rare departure from our use of framing wood, we're getting crafty and building this gear

station

out of maple plywood.

That means I need to plan this carefully instead of blocking more 2x4s where something needs to be reinforced. Mistakes are more costly with these things and I'm not in the mood to buy another blade. To attach this we used glue and pocket holes. To make a pocket hole you use this small jig that holds the drill bit at an angle. For me, this took a little understanding and yes, a piece of ruined maple plywood. I didn't realize it was necessary to put this stop on the drill bit to prevent it from going too deep. But after cutting a new piece and doing some testing with the pocket hole jig, I managed to mess it up again by drilling the holes on the wrong side.

But once I went over the cut list and drilled all the holes, things started to fit together a little better. While we complete the overall structure of this

mountain

bike gear

station

, Curtis is finishing up the tube section. And oh, how glorious it is. With everything clearly labeled and plenty of room for expansion, it shouldn't be a problem to keep it clean and organized. But we still have a lot to do at the change station. These small studs will act as hooks to hang helmets and backpacks. But we need a way to prevent items from coming off the ends.

Using the drill and a hole saw, we can cut these small pine circles that should fit tightly at the ends. After some measuring, I figured out the distance between the hooks, taking into account of course different sized helmets. To fix these dowels in place, all we need is a 1” paddle bit and some glue. Now comes the hard part… mounting this on the wall. We need to locate 4 beams, pre-drill holes for lag bolts, and then copy that same design into our gear station so everything lines up. Oh, and we need to make a cutout for the outlet on the far right.

I put the chances of all of this lining up at about 50/50. Now, this gear station is really starting to take shape. As you can see, the top is sized to fit these boxes. We'll end up with some empty ones for guest storage. At this point I can reach them, which means everyone should be able to too. In the past, we kept my bike light chargers and wireless shifter batteries here with all my camera gear. That will go in the change station. We are using a cable concealer to run a power strip from the outlet to the bottom of the shelf.

This long piece in the front not only adds strength to the shelf, but it also hides all the things we'll be mounting here. Since much of what we'll be

charging

is USB, we'll mount this hub here as a power source and then run all of the light's

charging

cables through another cable corrector in the center. To store and charge our bicycle

lights

we will use these metal baskets. For the Sync'r Carbon wireless swap batteries, we will mount the Archer charger on the right for quick access. With the organization of the camera equipment finished, we can fix this cable nest behind the toolbox.

This power strip is so large that it actually needs to be mounted diagonally. But we need those outlets for all the cameras, drills, drones, and AA chargers that power our equipment. Another thing we had in the old equipment area was the shoe rack we built in Berm Creek out of 10-inch PVC pipe. I'll divide it into two shelves: one for shoes and one for puppy supplies. And finally, we'll add some fun to our gear station with a mandatory RGB accent light. And now we can look at it. Maybe you're not as excited about the organization as I am, but this has been a long time coming.

Gear storage, helmet storage, light charging, bike parking and all elevated off the ground. I think we achieved what we set out to do with this

mountain

bike equipment station. And now the old equipment area is available, so... subscribe to our other channel, Berm Peak Express, to find out what we built there. And after that, it will be a long time before we need to build something for the store. This space is finished... for now. Next week I'll be traveling, but when I return we'll continue our work on Rhodorooter, hopefully in drier weather. Until then, thanks for joining me today and I'll see you next time.