oldlugs

As I posted in another forum here, I recently picked up a large hoard of parts, much of which are complete wheelsets.
I'm looking for creative ways to store say 300 pair of wheels, most are 26 and 27 inch. Think three speed and old road bike wheels. Right now I've got them leaning against one wall upstairs above my shop, I have them in rows, but all leaning against each other, with another row above each row hanging from the ceiling, but there has to be a better way. They're taking up a 15x25ft room with some in the other room stacked and hanging anywhere they will fit. The second room is full of bikes, all standing on their wheels, each facing opposite directions.
So far every bike or wheelset I needed to get at turned up to be at the far end of a row, meaning the whole row had to be moved or tilted the other way.
There are only four rows of bikes now, but the wheels are the biggest issue. I thought about running pipes overhead with hooks but that's a lot of weight on the roof trusses in an old building. (Its a lot of weight in a room that was originally an upstairs apartment or office area. I doubt whoever built those rooms intended them to hold five trailers full of bikes and parts). I did take some of them home, but I can only store so much at the house, and I've packed a spare room there with bike parts too. I've got 270 tubs of parts stashed in the garage, plus another 40 upstairs at the house. Plus, I've got over a hundred new bare rims and I've not yet got a count on all the new and used hubs yet. A lot of these wheels, rims, and bikes will get sold or traded but for now I need to get the whole mess organized in a somewhat small space so they don't take up so much space they take over the whole place. There may be more wheelsets to save as I go through the two trailers of old bikes too.

I'm looking for suggestions that will allow me to get at them without too much headache and to store them in a way they don't take up any more room than it necessary.

SJX426 

interested in a solution, don't really have one. I've tried to put rims between complete wheels but I don't have that many rims! A thought crossed my mind as I was thinking about the problem. If you hang one wheel and use a S shaped hood but one half twisted 90 degrees, you could use it to hang the second from the first from the axle of the first. That reduces the vertical space by 1/2 wheel diameter, almost. Hanging the next could be near the the first with only a little space between axles.

That is one row. The next row could be another overlap with the first.

I may have to try this myself! The only issue is the angle created from the offset weight from the second wheel. Use the rear as the first to hang and the front, the second.

If you find a pair of NOS Open 4CD's I would be interested in purchasing!

Hudson308 

I was worried about roof truss loading in my garage, trying to take snow loads into account as well. So instead of compromising the truss strength by screwing big hooks directly into the truss, I attached stubs to the sides of the trusses using deck screws. Then I attached a 2x4 stringer to the stubs, and screwed the big hooks to the 2x4 in a staggered manner. The staggered hooks allow me to hang the wheels a bit closer together.
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Another thing I'm doing is culling most of the steel rimmed wheels from the pile. I'll save the decent English 3-speed wheels and some early "drop-center" rims, but most of the others will get the hubs cut out before pitching the rims to the recycler.

oddjob2

@oldlugs, did you know the bikeforum rules, pics or it didn't happen. Good luck with your hoard!

Danbianchi881

+1

USAZorro

I like Hudson's idea, but it seems like with the number of wheels you're talking about, the price tag could get rather steep.

fwiw, I've faced this challenge on a much smaller scale. Suspended (or supported) pipes is relatively space efficient, but once you get more than 3 sets of wheels on a pipe, accessing them is quite difficult if the pipe is inside the rim. Probably better to hang them off the pipes with wire or string or something.

I have a stack of tubular rims stacked and duct-taped together in a column.

mstateglfr 

2 J hooks with a dowel rod. Load wheels onto the dowel rod and hang it on the J hooks.

If you don’t need the wheels often, you can fit 10 on a rod and place the hooks far apart.
If you need the wheels more frequently, you can fit 3 pairs on a rod- 1 on the outside of each J hook and 1 inside the hooks. It’s a little more $ for the hooks and more rods, but not a ton.

obrentharris 

What do you guys do with all these wheels that you store?
I haven't found anyone who wants them locally and they are cost prohibitive to ship.
My collection of old wheels is much more limited than what we are talking about here but I still have trouble finding homes for mid level wheels. (Normandy, Sunshine, etc) I've cut the hubs out of a few but then I never find a home for the hubs. 27" wheels, especially, are hard for me to move. I understand that someone who flips a lot of bikes might need a wheel to replace a trashed one once in a while: I just wish he lived next door to me so I could unload a couple pair of 27" wheels on him.
Brent

Glennfordx4

I have a shed filled with 99% of just wheels, I do a lot of flipping and they get used but I find just as many lol. In my shop I have good wheelsets and tires hanging from the ceiling, I used old steel road bike drop bars drilled and screwed to the joist, Keeps them about 7ft in the air, works better then I thought it would, 3 sets per bar seems to be max. I use old MTB flat bars drilled and mounted to hold tires. Was a good way to use parts rather then scrapping them.

Glenn

USAZorro

Post some of these hubs in the for sale. I am pretty certain they'd get snapped up. I seem to often need to build up a new set of wheels. Old clincher rims often don't cut it, and I buy new, but hubs... I love re-using them.

oldlugs

I like the idea of the J hooks and S hooks but one thought that comes to mind is that while most wheel sets aren't that heavy individually, the combined weight here is likely well over 1,500 lbs. I don't think the roof trusses were meant to have that much weight hanging from them, nor were the walls. I'm not opposed to spend some money to if the solution really works, a hundred bucks for a few boxes of hooks isn't a big deal.
I've probably already got 200 or those hooks in the garage now holding misc. parts from the walls and rafters.
The guy that had these had the wheels hanging from the upstairs floor joists, which were the bottom of his truss's but the upstairs floor was sagging over a foot from both the weight hanging on it and the weight of the parts upstairs. I won't be keeping the junk bikes we found but I will save the wheels if they're reusable.
Low and middle range bike wheels sell faster than high end wheels, there are far more lower end bikes out there than high end bikes. Not many people around here have top of the line bikes. I can sell 50 cheap bikes to every $150-200 bike.
The three speed wheelsets are the most valuable to me, this lot has quite a few old Raleigh and other English three speed frames and parts, the wheels are likely for those bikes so they have to be saved till I can match up wheels with bikes. I think the guy that had all this had taken a lot of bikes apart in the idea of saving space storing them. Many wheelsets have letters and numbers on them, so do the frames, and the forks, all stored separately. I think he tore down many bikes, then cleaned and processed the parts so he could assemble them later when he had room or a buyer. I found books that listed bikes with letter/number codes, with a list of what that bike needed to be complete or repaired. For instance, one Raleigh Sports was listed as K34, his notes read that this bike had a bad front wheel, bent chainguard, and needed tires. I found a frame marked K34, a wheelset marked K34, a fork marked K34, plus a tub marked the same containing 32 spokes, a hub, the crankset, BB, headset, rear rack, two used chainguards, (one bent), a saddle and post, pedals, etc. The problem was it was buried deep in the mess upstairs. The date on that page was 5-21-1969. The bike is likely a mid 60's frame, the rear hub dated 1964. I found over 200 bikes in this state. Most are English 3 speeds or older road bikes. None are high end bikes, 95% of all the bikes have steel wheels. There are new alloy rims, and dozens of new alloy road wheelsets but nothing high end. The best wheelset I've found so far were the 27" Rigida 1320 rims spoked to HF Campagnolo hubs and a few to some Maillard Luxe and Pro model hubs. There are several single wall 27" Araya hubs laced to various Shimano hubs, everything from old '333' HF hubs to newer 600EX and Dura Ace hubs. The problem is I really don't want to let anything go till I'm sure I don't have a bike here that needs them. Nearly every part he had was tagged with a letter and number code. How many he split up and sold is still mystery but he was organized enough to have everything marked. The bad part is though everything is marked in old Masking tape over cardboard tags he made, some of the tags are falling apart.
I did find some nicer frames but nothing spectacular. I only found 19 700C wheelsets in the entire lot, all of them are either Rigida 1320 rims or Weinmann Concave wheels for stock Raleigh bikes. There are a half dozen mid 70's Raleigh Super Course, Super Grand Prix, and Tourer frames in the lot so its likely those wheels match those bikes.

There are pics posted at on the Catch of the day thread here at BF: https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-v...aved-dump.html
I actually started posting there because this whole find started out as a few trash picked wheels, which later turned out to be several truck and trailer loads of parts from an old back yard bike shop.
Right now I'm still trying to sort the parts out and get those that haven't been unloaded from the trailers put somewhere. A lot of these are just low end bikes and parts, ther turned out to be far more bikes than I had first thought. I made a deal to unload a good many of the lesser bikes already but it still leaves me with two full containers of used mid grade steel wheel bikes. Many are just single speed middle weight bikes, some coatster brake lightweights, some old cruisers, etc. Not necessarily department store bikes but nothing special either. Lots of Ross, Columbia, some Schwinn, some Rollfast, and many Nishiki, Panasonic, and similar three speeds. This guy seems to have had a thing for three speed bikes, they dominate the lot 2 to 1. Many are Shimano hub bikes, not Sturmey Archer. Many need nothing but tires and some fresh grease. Most have been sitting so long the grease in the bearings has turned to stone, most won't even roll. Just about every hub will have to come apart, as will every BB, HS, and hub. Some bikes will be worth doing this, others not so much. I unloaded all the Huffy, Sears, Roadmaster, Wards, and similar bikes that were complete but in need of service already, I also unloaded all the lesser bikes that were in need of major repairs, had destroyed wheels, were maybe rusty, or those that were repainted, or the really small sizes to a guy who builds bike for kids who can't afford them. It saved me storing another few hundred bikes that would have likely just gotten piled up outback under a tarp. I kept anything European, or Japanese, most of the Schwinn, all of the British brands, and a few of the really clean older Columbia and Rollfast bikes. Right now the bikes are in one room, the wheels in another upstairs, for the most part the better stuff got hauled upstairs at work, but what's left in the two trailers is mostly unsorted other than a quick sorting out of the junk as we loaded everything. (It was all moved in 5 days by hand last week). I've still got dozens of tubs I've not opened, none have been sorted out, and I've not yet gone through the tool boxes or the parts bins which were basically just loaded as they sat into my trailer and stacked up down my basement at the house for now. He didn't have things sorted by part type or number, everything was sorted by the bike he intended it for. Most every part has a bike tag number attached to it. As we were loading the stuff, he was walking around pointing out what he had it for and where that bike was stored. There was so much stuff that a good bit of it had been blocked in by newer shelves he added. I found bikes I couldn't remove from rooms because there were shelves built blocking their exit. (There was also a few loads of pure scrap, we found old oil barrels and trash cans filled with used ball bearings, broken parts, old cables, rusty bits, and used inner tubes. I don't think he ever tossed an old tire or tube.
There were two steamer trunks upstairs full with used rusty spokes sorted by size. His used inner tubes were sorted by size in barrels and wood crates. Used tubes that needed patching were marked where they needed a patch but rolled up and tossed in a crate. He did have a huge assortment of new tubes too. The new parts assortment was by far more than any current bike shop keeps, but nothing was newer than maybe the mid 80's or so with the bulk of it being early to mid 70's era bikes and parts. To my surprise, there was almost no 20" bikes or parts, besides a few BMX wheels and a few boxes of used parts. There were a few 24" bikes, and a couple cases of 24" tires but mostly all 26x1 3/8" bikes and wheels, and 27" steel wheels. We were using wheel barrows to move loose hubs, he had crates and barrels of used three speed hubs, the barrels were too heavy to move even with a hand truck so we were unloading the barrels by hand to the point where we could move them. My back still aches from helping carry over 200 milk crates full of hubs down the ladder from the attic there and from along one wall. I can only imagine how many wheels that guy cut apart to accumulate that many used hubs. The bad parts it, its all pretty much in unused condition.

One idea I did have for the wheels was to build racks out of 2x4 lumber with pipes running across the top of each shelf, then I'd hang each wheel with varying length hooks from that pipe, it would allow the wheels to stack closer to each other by offsetting the height of the axles, and an individual wheel could be removed without removing any other wheels. I also thought about making these racks out of all steel. I don't think attaching to the roof trusses or wall studs is a good idea, maybe for a few wheels but if I did all of them I think I'd damage the building.

Glennfordx4

I did reinforce my roof rafters before I hung the wheels up, but you have way too many wheels to do this. When I was into Motorcycles ( Just like the Bicycles ) I had a big storage area and made a system using 1/2" pipe hanging with my wheels on them, worked good and I want to build the same kinda setup for bicycle wheels when I get some more room.

Glenn

DiegoFrogs

Could you use a system of relatively thin tensioned cables, and hang the wheels with wire hooks on the cables?

I just worry that as you add more 'stuff,' the additional supporting structure could be much worse than the 'stuff' you were trying to support in the first place. Adding $3 hooks to hold something you will sell for $4 doesn't make much sense. Some eyebolts and wire, and maybe some turnbuckles, could maybe work. Tensioned cables could maybe add some rigidity to the triangulation of the structure, too, if you do it right.

Whit51 

If you use the 1/2" pipe or conduit method (using cheap pipe hangers to connect conduit to rafters) you can make your own S hooks by cutting and bending sections of wire coat hangers -- the S hooks also work well for hanging a wheel from another wheel. You can hang a wheel from the pipe, hang its mate below it using the S hook, and hang another wheelset below that wheel if you've got the space.

iab

Store them in other people's houses by selling them.

wrk101

I use 1/2 inch conduit on the ceiling, attached with clamp on conduit hangers so there is a gap between the conduit and the ceiling. I then hang pairs of wheels on vinyl covered hooks that I pre-bend to fit around the conduit. I use the same set up for bikes and framesets. By using the same exact set up I can use the hooks to hang whatever I want wherever I want. Each wall of the room gets conduit going it’s length.

My avatar is a section of this holding frames.

curbtender

Same here. I made hooks with a bunch of thick hangars. I have thicker pipe in my shed that I can hang bikes from.

curbtender

In the Eastbay, Pinole, but always up to swapping with locals.

wrk101

"Low and middle range bike wheels sell faster than high end wheels, there are far more lower end bikes out there than high end bikes. Not many people around here have top of the line bikes. I can sell 50 cheap bikes to every $150-200 bike. "

On the other hand, the sale of one set of high end wheels can equal five or even ten sets of the low end stuff. And I would prefer one transaction over ten! And high end hubs are easy to sell. I tend to just donate the low end stuff, not worth the time to deal with anymore.

I need to cull my wheels this year. Keep or sell the best, donate the rest.

John E

Check out you wheel collection and toss any rims that are questionable or worse, either because of sidewall wear or flat spots, dimples, or other irreparable damage. Even if you keep the spokes (occasionally worth the effort) and the hubs (frequently worth the effort), you have just saved yourself a ton of storage space.

dddd

I use hooks sliding on a very long pipe, but the wheelsets are first zip-tied together so as to utilize more available height while making more of the available length of the pipe.

oldlugs

What I've found over the years is that there's no call for high end wheels, those that can afford higher end components can afford to buy new or new old stock. Their not shopping on CL.
I put an ad up for and old steel 10 speed bicycle wheelset, I get 20 emails and their gone for $60 in a day or two. If I put an add up for a nice set of alloy wheels with decent hubs at $100, they take a year to sell, If I put a set of vintage 700C Rigida rims with Campy hubs built with new old stock parts, at $250, they'll sit forever or I get offers of $50.
The general public doesn't know the difference around here. Bikes are kids toys or transportation for alcoholics in this area. There's a good reason all the bike shops are gone. Every better quality bike I've sold in the past 10 years or so has gone to someone who had traveled more than 200 miles to come get it. A few came farther than that.

I like the idea of the pipe to hang the rims from but that still puts all the weight on the roof trusses. I may do something similar but with some 2" pipes for legs and support the weight off the floor.

About 60% of these wheelsets are new, the rest are just super clean. I really can't sell any of it until I'm sure I don't have the rest of the bike here. I'd hate to sell off the wheelset and find out a few months down the road I need them for a bike.
I did a quick count, there are 233 -27" wheels, 164, 26" wheels, and 51 pair of 26x1-3/8" wheels for three speed bikes. There's 5 pair of 700C road bike wheels, and roughly 300 new rims in boxes. The bare rims are best off staying in the original boxes, that way they can be shelved and accessed easier.
I picked up a muffler rack from a local parts store, it will make a great frame hanging rack upstairs. Its also got a slew of 1/4" aluminum double J hooks that hang over the bar, this will allow me to alternate the frames, one up, one down on the rack.
The guy that had these had the frames hanging on 3/4" black iron pips, but the pipes were sagging pretty bad. Figure if each frame weighs roughly 7 lbs, times 50 per length, that's a lot of weight overall.
Here's a pic of the frames we found upstairs in the shop I cleaned out, the pic was taken in almost no light on a cell phone with no flash, but you get the picture of how he had the frames hanging. This was only at the front and rear of the garage upstairs, no frames were hanging in the middle. A few were standing up tucked into the eaves though. All of these in the pic are 3 speed frames, nearly all Raleigh or Raleigh sub brands.

non-fixie 

Wheel sets are really nice to have available for projects, but a PITA to store. Best I've come up with so far is a box of nails, a ball of string and a large attic:

dddd

If the horizontal pipe is somewhat supported to the ground (or to a load-bearing wall) at it's ends, it can sag a good deal and still be safe, even the very large dia. pipe shown below is well short of yielding, I flexed it further with a "bounce" test and it still springs back straight after the 14 heavy bikes are removed.
Smaller diameter pipes can curve even further without taking a set (and will never take a set from additional years of sustaining the static load since this is iron/steel we are talking about).

oldlugs

Years ago when I worked for a bike shop that did both new and used bikes the owner had wheels and frames stored in the attic, getting to them meant crawling over and through the beams of the trusses. Everything was hanging from gutter spikes or nails with bailing twine. One fall we kept hearing an occasional thump upstairs and couldn't figure out what it was. Then we started to notice wheels on the floor with no strings attached.
What was going on was rodents, either mice or rats were chewing through the string and stealing it for nesting material. We would have never figured it out if it wasn't for one clumsy rat that must have been hanging on a wheelset while he chewed through the string. The wheelset was near the stairs. Both wheels landed at the bottom of the steps, with the rat dead under the two wheels. Some liberally placed rat baits and the problem ended but we started using old cables and spokes bent into S hooks versus the string.

(As I began typing this here, I just had to run upstairs to see what the clatter was, since no one else is in the shop right now, it couldn't have been someone sorting parts, When I opened the door to the one room, with all the rims lined up in rows, a cat ran out with a chipmunk it its mouth). I don't have cat and have no clue where it came from. I've never found a chipmunk in the building here before, plenty of mice but nothing larger. I did find a racoon once in the drop ceiling in the office downstairs about 12 years ago.

I have a guy who said he's got some odd sized pallet racking, I plan to go take a look at that in a few days. Maybe I can mod that into some fancy wheel racks by running short pieced of pipe front to back on the pallet rack, that way there will be less axle/spoke interference when I need to pull only one or two wheels out.

I also got a call from the guy who had all this, he tells me he found more parts and to stop by with my truck later.
By the sound of his call I think I best take one of the high cube vans home tonight.