Moving motorcycles around just got a whole lot easier. These nifty bike stands use omnidirectional wheels, so you can pop your bike up off the ground, then spin it around and push it easily around the garage in any direction. A great idea from Australian company Dynamoto.
I've never met a motorcyclist who felt he had a big enough garage. Such a thing simply doesn't exist. And once you start building a bit of a collection in there, moving the damn things around can get to be a bit tedious.
Dynamoto's omnidirectional motorcycle stands make a lot of sense. They operate like a set of regular race stands, lifting both wheels off the ground. But once the bike's lifted, they let you push it around in any direction with consummate ease.
That's thanks to a set of multidirectional wheels – another Australian invention by Rotacaster – that are almost as happy rolling sideways or diagonally or rotating on the spot as they are going backwards and forwards.
Each Rotacaster wheel consists of three fixed-orientation wheel plates that are free to rotate forwards and backwards, but each plate has eight tough polyurethane rollers around the perimeter that can roll sideways. The result is a set of wheels that can swivel on the spot or move in any direction without any caster offset that might make them a pain to move. As thick as they are, they travel nicely over concrete joins and cracks without sticking.
Dynamoto uses three of these Rotocaster wheels on each stand, and the company makes three different stands: a rear wheel stand for bikes with single sided swingarms, another rear stand for bikes with double sided swingarms and pickup spools, and a very simple front wheel stand that simply pokes in under the front tire, so you don't need anything on the front wheel. On the other hand, it won't let you take the front wheel off in the workshop, so you'll need to find another solution if you do your own spannering.
The rear stands have a handle that pulls off and re-inserts in the front when the bike's off the ground to act as a bumper and prevent the bike from tipping forward off the stand accidentally.
There doesn't appear to be any way to lock the bike in place, so the Dynamoto stands won't be useful on slanted floors, but watching how easy it is to move bikes around or rotate them on the spot in the promotional video below is very impressive. They look easy to get a bike up onto, and once it's on, spinning the bike around or pushing it around the garage looks very easy.
Price-wise, a set of Dynamoto front and rear stands costs AUD 675 (US$515), which puts them at around 50 percent more expensive than a good set of traditional race stands. Mind you, they're not really competing with those, and they offer a totally different set of capabilities, particularly when it comes to parking your bike and moving it around in a tight garage. Nice idea, and we could sure use some in the Gizmag garage on busy days.
Source: Dynamoto
