Dick McWay sent in this text and photos describing how he made a front-end stand for his FJR so he could remove the front wheel. I liked this so much that I duplicated Dick's idea myself. On 10/23/02 Dick wrote:

I had about 6200 miles on the stock BT020's and the rear was even with the wear bars and noticeably squared off. I also changed the front tire even though there is plenty of tread left. It was quite feathered (hi/lo on adjacent blocks).

I usually do all my own tire work - dismounting, mounting, balancing but got totally hung up trying to get the 2nd bead to go on on the rear. So, off to the bike shop to let them do both, as well as the balancing. I really need to get a tire changing machine.

BTW, mounted Dunlop D220's. The rear seems to be about 1/2" narrower across the tread and has a measured 8/32 tread depth (advertised at 9/32)

For the stand, it is all 1" pipe. I had wifey lean over on the rear rack to lift the front end and I placed the jack stands under the fork legs. Since I also had the rear wheel off, I tied up the front with the big "U" stand for extra assurance. I ran the tie down straps down under the lower triple tree. For quick change stuff, the jack stands will be fine.

If you need to remove fork legs, then the "U" stand will work. Used it to support the Super Hawk while I had the forks done over on it. I actually first saw this type of a rig at the race track for one of the non factory Ducati teams a couple of years ago. I said, "I can do that".

H Marc's Version

Several of us, including myself and Paul Winslow, decided to duplicate Dick's stand idea above. The photo below shows the parts I bought at a local Home Depot for about $35. It is all 3/4" I.D. black iron water pipe (made in China, BTW).

These were all off-the-shelf parts. Ideally, 4'6" uprights might work better than the 5' ones, but the extra height is probably okay.

It took about 5 minutes to assemble the parts like this. I got all the joints fairly tight except the ones attaching the feet to the uprights. I left those loose enough to pivot as shown (for ease of storage).

The finished result.

You can see that mine is quite a bit taller than Dick's. This turns out to be useful if you use this stand during the throttle body sync or sparkplug change. In that case, you can unbolt the gastank and use a tie-down to suspend it in a level orientation under the stand. (Thanks to Paul for this idea)

That way, if you have only a little fuel in the tank, you can still start and run the engine (necessary for the throttle body sync). By tilting the gastank back on its rear pivot, you may not get any fuel flow if the tank is almost empty.

Copyright © 2002, by H. Marc Lewis. All rights reserved.