The Sportster garage

Once you've got and Iron Sportster, you need a place to put it. Soon after, you need a place to work on it. So then you need a place for your tools. And then you need a place for the hundreds of spare parts or rare assemblies not made in 40 years. You also need a place to hang out with your pals, to talk about-- what else --Iron Sportsters.

Categories
Building
Parts
Tools

I used to take the Sportster Garage pretty seriously. I lived in a garage. Well, actually it was an industrial office space and shop. I called it the warehouse/shop/office/consulting-place megaplex. It served me well for 35 years. These days I am more conventional and I get along with a 2-car garage here at Tranquility Base in Florida. My shop was like the Winchester Mystery House. I kept building and adding to it to accommodate more and more Sportsters, tools, and machinery. Above are the bikes and old steel desks I used as workbenches. Also a nice Quincy compressor. One very nice thing about the shop was that it had 3-phase power.

You might not need 3-phase power in your garage, but here are some tips and tricks so you do a better job building, maintaining, and carefing for your Iron Sportster. I think the best tip is to stay organized. When I moved to Florida I found tools and parts I did not know I owned. Now I have everything put away nicely with pictures to record things.

All those bikes in the first picture get worked on with all these tools. At least they used to until I got civilized and moved to a house in Florida. Things are re-arranged, but I still have most of the stuff in this picture.

Here is the same area ten years earlier, before I built the mezzanine. It shows a bike up on one of the old steel desks I use as workbenches. I got them at a used office furniture store in Silicon Valley. When I moved to Florida, I kept all these old steel desks. They are built like a battleship. You can also see the row of 8-foot fluorescent lights above the tool boxes, I learned long ago, if you can't see, you can see it.

Then there are the parts. With Iron Sportsters, you get to have a lot of parts. In the old warehouse/shop/office/consulting-place megaplex, I kept the parts in home-made cabinets. I had already started using the office store tubs, but you can also see a lot of loose stuff, Those 3000-dollar Thunderheads sitting so close to the edge makes me nervous even now.

I have gotten the parts more organized over the years, as you can see from the "Parts" category in this section. One important factor is selling off a lot of parts, since I can always get them on eBay.

Here is the other side of those shelves. Things are in a hodgepodge, and this is the era when I used cardboard boxes for a lot of stuff. Don't cheap out. Go to Office Depot and buy www.reallyusefulproducts.com/ You can just make out the flanges that run-top-to bottom so you can stack these tubs 8-high when you move to Florida.

Next to the shelves I tossed in a bunch of fenders and other light stuff. I have since gotten much more careful and keep them separated in a wooden cabinet. Things did get out of hand, like when I bought the 8000-pound Bostomatic mill. A mini-mill makes more sense.

A nice garage lets you do things like hang your bike with a come-along suspended by a load cell, so you can get an exact weight. In case you were wondering, my 1977 Sportster weights 549.8 pounds. This scale broke, a tiny wire in the load cell. My pal fixed it so it is his now.

Here is a rear view of the bikes waiting to go back into the garage after I built a mezzanine. I suspect if I bought a house with a 50-by-50 foot steel building for a shop I would fill it up. So now I am trying to get everything to fit in a two-car garage, with room for a car no less. I will keep you posted.

A nice garage also lets your mind run free, some times too free, like this open-primary project I eventually scrapped. But it was nice to have all the parts and the space to piece it together.

No matter if you work out of a little storage space in your apartment or if you do have a 50-by-50 foot shop, I hope you can get some tips from this section to help the care and feeding of your Iron Sportster addiction.