Rear Stand Face Off
For years I went with a budget rear stand and for many of those years I cursed it. The rubber was dry rotting off the already small diameter wheels and it made wheeling the bike around the garage a hassle. Based on my positive experiences with a Vortex front stand, I decided to upgrade. What I soon found out was that I merely traded one problem for another—two problems actually. Just eight months into ownership with that stand, I tried out yet another. That brings us to our comparison; Vortex’s Rear Stand vs. Woodcraft’s Adjustable Rear Stand. Read along as I take you through the set up and function of these two.
Assembly
For good reason, neither of these rear stands comes to you fully assembled. Why pay double the shipping when you can throw a few parts together and be done with it? The Vortex comes with five pieces in total, not counting the hardware. Three of those pieces constitute what I would call the frame while the other two are the adjustable spool receivers. Woodcraft’s comes with a one-piece frame, and a pair of uprights, adjustable spool receivers, quick clamps, and pins.
In spite of its fewer parts, the Vortex has a fair bit of hardware and takes longer to assemble. By contrast, the Woodcraft stand only requires that you assemble the adjustable uprights. The upright tubes slide into their receivers, you insert a pin to locate them, set your spool width, and you’re done.
RD1: Draw
Ease of Use
You always want things to go as easily as possible no matter if you’re in your garage or at the track. That said, pulling into the paddock after putting your all into a session is when you really need things to be easy. You’re probably sweating, possibly winded, and definitely looking forward to a break. Things should be less challenging at this point. That brings us to one of my two major gripes with the Vortex Rear Stand. The sheer effort required to lift the back of a bike using their stand seemed to border on absurd. Eventually, I went full nerd mode to find out why. Bear with me.
A rear stand is basically a lever, with one cool modification. We know from basic physics that a lever produces mechanical advantage when placed over a fulcrum. The quantity of mechanical advantage is determined by the ratio of two distances; from the fulcrum to the end of the lever, and from the fulcrum to the weight.
In these proportions, the lever provides a 2:1 mechanical advantage. It requires half the force to lift the weight.
Rear stands cleverly replace a stationary fulcrum with a wheel. As the lever is moved down, the ratio is changed and leverage is improved. At the point where the weight is resting directly above the axle, there is no effort required. As the fulcrum extends beyond the weight, the lever bottoms out and the weight holds it to the ground.
Why all this background? The Vortex rear stand ambitiously raises the rear tire of our SV650’s 180/55-17 rear tire 5.5” off the ground. There are multiple reasons that’s not good, but sticking with the topic of ease of use, this creates mechanical advantage bordering on zero. The ratio mentioned above is a mere 1.2:1 so you are applying force only 20% less than the weight of the rear of the motorcycle. It’s a struggle on the SV which, as a track bike, is rather light. It borders on dangerous with my Speed Twin, which isn’t exactly portly itself.
This basic illustration of the Vortex rear stand geometry shows just how little mechanical advantage is gained.
The Woodcraft adjustable rear stand offers you the option of just how high you want the rear tire of your bike to get. On its lowest setting, the SV650’s rear tire sits about one inch from the ground. Its four additional positions will allow me to get it as high as five inches if I so desired. If I had the need to use tire warmers, I’d probably go another half inch and have ample clearance. I don’t use tire warmers, so the lowest setting works great for me. But the main reason I bring this up is because lifting the tire only as far as you need to pays huge dividends when it comes to effort. When I use the Woodcraft stand on its lowest setting, the position of the fulcrum changes in my favor. Even though the Woodcraft is more compact with a lever 1” shorter than the Vortex, now I am only applying the force equal to 1/3 of the weight of the rear of the bike.
Note how moving the fulcrum closer to the weight, as the Woodcraft rear stand does, greatly increases mechanical advantage.
Beyond the ease of lifting the bike, or lack thereof, lofting the rear tire so high into the air is really inconvenient when it comes to removing and reinstalling the rear wheel. When it comes to rear wheel removal, it’s not that big of a deal since you have gravity on your side, however Woodcraft has a simple solution that even makes that process easier. If you’ve ever performed this task before, you know that there are several parts that come off along with the rear wheel and they all need to be kept clean. That’s where these simple rubber capped metal rods come into play. They allow you to organize your axle, axle nut, and spacers and keep them clean.
Woodcraft’s thoughtfully includes pegs for clean axle, nut, and spacer storage
When reassembling the rear wheel, you have to get a lot of parts aligned just so including the brake caliper bracket and spacers on each end, plus you need to align the chain adjusters so your axle can slide in. The less weight you have to manage while doing this the better. It’s a lot easier to do this if your wheel is close to the floor to begin with. For this reason I like the stand to lift the rear wheel as little as possible. With the Woodcraft at its lowest setting I can run the tire up on a 1x6 plank and have the wheel within a 1/4” of where I need it. Try this trick next time you change your rear tire. By contrast, I’d have to run it up a 6x6 with the Vortex.
RD2: Woodcraft
Durability
If the Vortex had proven durable I probably would have endured the lifting effort for a bit longer. I mentioned the issue in my earlier article about assembling the Vortex and I was even still optimistic that it was a random flaw. To catch you up, the Vortex spool adapters are held in place by a set screw that threads into a nut which is welded to the frame. Upon initial assembly, those welds failed. A week later, Vortex shipped me a replacement part. Wary of this happening again, I used a minimal amount of torque on the screws, but the spool adapters kept sliding. Little by little I increased the torque to keep them in place, but still they wouldn’t stay in place. I applied a little bit more torque and snap, the weld broke again.
I have only owned the Woodcraft adjustable rear stand for a few days, so I can’t speak with the same authority I can with my eight months with the Vortex. However, I can say that it didn’t break when I assembled it. Furthermore, the set screws on the Woodcraft thread into a solid block of metal. There are no welds to break there so I am confident that failure mode will not repeat itself with this unit.
On previous stands I have owned, which were admittedly budget-priced, I’ve had the rubber on the wheels dry up and fall off in chunks. That makes for a lumpy ride when you’re pushing the bike around, and can lead to it falling off the stand. Vortex uses a similar strategy, with soft rubber tires molded around hard plastic wheels. Their total diameter is 4.5” which is sufficient for clearing any small rocks in the paddock or the oversized expansion joints in my garage floor. In my ownership they have not shown any signs of falling apart, but again, that’s only after eight months. The advantage to their construction is very quiet operation. Combined with the plastic slides on the frame, pushing my bike around the garage is practically silent.
Woodcraft uses one-piece, solid plastic wheels. Again, if they should fail, it won’t be due to the tread rotting off. They measure 5” in diameter so like the Vortex wheels, they easily roll over small debris and cracks. They’re certainly louder as they do so, but that doesn’t matter much to me. Rather than clip-on pieces of plastic, the Woodcraft rear stand uses welded-on flat pieces of metal. They certainly look to be more robust, but they do lightly scratch my epoxy painted floors.
RD3: Woodcraft
Value
Though there is a price gap between them, both of these stands fit in the mid-price bracket, so you can certainly buy cheaper or you can certainly pay more. By now you’ve no doubt figured out what I have, that the Woodcraft is a better stand. But is it worth the asking price? As of this writing it appears the Vortex retails for $150 and the Woodcraft for $185, though you can find each of them cheaper online. For the roughly $35 extra, it’s a no-brainer.
RD4: Woodcraft
Decision
The Woodcraft Adjustable Rear Stand wins in a unanimous decision—granted I’m the only judge. If we’re looking at a ten point must system, Woodcraft gets the full 40 while Vortex scores a 28 after taking it squarely on the chin in both the Ease of Use and Durability rounds. It’s been a long time since I have been happy with a rear stand and this one is fantastic. Woodcraft, raise your glove.
