VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Stop your bike from rolling away or tipping over! In this video, I demonstrate the common (and annoying) problems with parking a bike on a kickstand, especially when it’s loaded with gear or on a slope. Then, I show you how to make a simple, effective, and completely free DIY parking brake in just a few minutes using an old inner tube.
What You’ll Learn:
00:00 Introduction to the problem with bicycles
04:46 Real-world demos: rolling forward, tipping over, and kickstand failure.
09:42 Step-by-step: How to make your own from a found inner tube.
12:32 How to apply and remove it easily while riding.
14:58 Side-by-side comparison: With vs. Without the parking brake.
15:57 Pro tips: Why inner tubes beat bungee cords
18:25 Conclusion & End Credits
This simple hack has been essential for my bike tours, preventing damage to my gear, cameras, and the bike itself. Whether you’re a cycle tourist, a commuter with heavy panniers, or just someone tired of their bike falling over, this 10-minute project is a game-changer.
Materials Needed: Just an old bicycle inner tube (or a sturdy rubber strap), scissors, and a minute or two of your time.
#BikeHack #CycleTouring #DIY #BicycleRepair #BikeTips #ParkingBrake #BikeTour #Upcycling #BicycleLife #Kickstand #BikeSafety
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, I want to put my bike here. Put down the kickstand. And you see that over it went right away.
Here I am standing beside my bicycle and I’m making this video to answer the question, what is a parking brake on a bicycle? What’s it good for? Why do you need one? Should you put one on your bicycle? First of all, a parking brake is a very simple thing. If you’ve ever driven a car and you’ve parked your car on a hill and you’re worried that the car is going to roll backwards, well, you apply the parking brake. And I think everybody has done it in a car, right? You park your car, then you grab that little handle that sits in older cars anyway. It sits between the two seats and you go pull up that handle and that pulls in the wheels brake pads essentially. It just locks onto the wheels. You pull up the parking brake lever, locks your brakes, and your car is not going to roll backwards down the hill when you get out. And that’s essentially what a parking brake on a bicycle does. Most people don’t need one. An average cyclist who’s just riding their bike around a city on the weekends, you probably don’t need a parking brake. But if you’re going long distance and you have a bunch of heavy bags on your bike or you’re mounting cameras on your bicycle because you’re a YouTuber, then a parking brake can be very useful. Not only useful, it could even be essential because without a parking brake, as I’ll demonstrate in a moment, your bicycle does a lot of weird things. It has a tendency to fall over and that can damage everything on your bicycle. It has a tendency to roll forward, roll backward, and the front wheel when you park the bike, you lower a kickstand, park your bike, the front wheel will spin to the left or to the right, and this can cause all kinds of problems. And if you take 10 minutes out of your life to make a parking brake and then you go on your round the world tour, I think you’ll find those 10 minutes were very, very well spent. So, first of all, let me try to demonstrate what your bike does when you don’t have a parking brake. I don’t have a heavy load on my bike right now, but I’ll sort of try to simulate some conditions to show you what I’m talking about. It turns out that the first problem is really easy to demonstrate. I can do it right here. I don’t even have to go anywhere. So, here’s my bike. I don’t have any panniers on it or anything. So, the front wheel isn’t heavy at all. I do have this camera mount, this little broomstick, so that kind of helps show the effect I’m talking about. So, here’s my bike. I found a place I want to park it. I put down the kickstand. And now I let go of the bike. Boom. The front wheel spins to the left because the bike is leaning to the left. And then the wheel will spin. The handlebars spin. And in my case, it’s an even bigger problem because I have this camera mount on the front and it could whack people if my camera is on there. It hits the wall, it hits the fence, the bike can fall over now because it’s unbalanced because the wheel has turned over. So, yeah, let me show it again from another angle. And yeah, you can really see what I’m talking about. Same thing. I just roll my bike up to where I want to park it here. Next to the wall, put down the kickstand, and then I let go of my bike and walk away and the whole handlebar just and the wheel spins to the left. And as I said, if you have a normal bike, you don’t have bags on it, it’s probably not a big deal. But if you’re touring, the weight of the panniers really exaggerates that swing. And as I said, even the momentum of the swing can knock your bike off balance. The whole thing falls over. You break your camera, you break your handlebars, you break your gear shifters. You know, you don’t want your bike falling over all the time. And a parking brake can help with that because what it does is it locks your front brake. Now, the wheel itself can’t move and then the bike has less of a tendency to spin. Let’s see if I can illustrate the problems that I’ve been talking about. I just hopped on my bike and I rode a little bit and I found this relatively empty road. So, I think I can do a demo here safely. And this road and this hill isn’t even very steep. It’s a very subtle grade going downhill right now. And let’s see what happens if I try to park my bike here with a kickstand but no parking brake. So, this is where I want to leave my bicycle. I just get it in position here, put down the kickstand, lean the bike over, let go. There it goes. Ah, and there it went off down the hill just in a straight line. In this case, I caught it before it fell over. But even this relatively shallow slope is enough to send my bike off without a parking brake. And as I said, it doesn’t even have any bags on it. There’s no weight. The effect is much stronger when there’s a lot of weight on the bike. So, in the first example, the bike was actually rolling forward, which gave me enough time to run up to it and catch it before it fell over. It was going to ride away without me. But quite often, what happens is the handlebar will spin as I already showed to the left or to the right. And then if it goes to the right, let’s see what happens in that situation. All right, here’s my bike. Put down the kickstand and it goes to the right. And over it goes the whole thing. And you can imagine if I had my GoPro here at the end, that’s the end of my GoPro smashes on the pavement. You know, I just lost a camera. So, for me, it’s a pretty serious thing to have a parking brake. What happens if the handlebars happen to turn to the left? Let’s see if that happens. This time, I’ve got my bike in the right position. Put down the kickstand. I let go and it’s going to the left and over. Yeah, it’s going to go over one more time. One of the contributing factors to this problem is the design of most kickstands. I mean, kickstands are designed so that they flip up and out of the way, obviously, so you don’t they’re not hitting the ground when you’re riding. You’re not hitting them with your pedals. And when you want to park the bike, you flip the kickstand down and it kind of locks into this place here. I mean, it’s blocked. It can’t go any farther forward. But there’s nothing to prevent it from going in the other direction. The slightest amount of force and it will just move backwards again. And that’s exactly what happens when the bike moves forward. You can see right here, the kickstand is touching the ground. But now as the bike move forward, it’s bending and it’s going towards the back and then your bike falls over. So that’s a problem when you’re facing downhill. And you might think, well, if you’re facing uphill, then everything works fine. But as I’ve discovered over the years, a typical kickstand introduces another problem when you have your bike parked on an uphill slope. I’ll show you that right now. Here I am at the exact same spot more or less on the same road on the same slope. So, as you can see, if I try to park my bike here, the bike wants to roll backwards because the hill, you know, is going in that direction. And you think, well, the kickstand will prevent that from happening. And it does. So, let’s put down the kickstand. So, now I’ve got the kickstand on. And now the bike is not rolling backwards. And you think that’s good, but again, we’re talking about just a normal unloaded bike. If you have a fully loaded touring bike that weighs anywhere from 20 to 50 kg with all of your gear, the bike still wants to roll backwards and all of that force is being absorbed by that tiny kickstand down there. And I’ve seen it happen many times where that kickstand with all that weight forcing it backwards digs into the ground and it just snaps. It’s too much force for it to hold in place basically. And that is again where a parking brake comes in handy where you have something that locks the brakes. Now the brake is holding the bicycle in place and the kickstand is just holding it upright. Right? So then you’ve taken the load off of the kickstand. That was a quick look at what happens when you don’t have a parking brake. But how do you make one? What exactly is this mysterious thing that I’ve been babbling about? Well, I think you can buy them. I haven’t really seen one in a store ever, but I think I’ve seen them online. You know, this is not a new idea. I did not invent this in any way, and I think some companies out there have made and they sell a parking brake, which is essentially a big powerful rubber band of the right shape and length. That’s all it is. And the great thing about riding your bicycle around the world, I think as many long distance cyclists will agree, is found treasure. We’re going so slowly that we see all the things at the side of the road that people have lost. You know, people that have fall out of cars that get thrown away. Like in my lifetime, I found books, cassettes, tools, and you see a lot of rubber. Like you’ll find abandoned rubber straps all over the side of the road that fell off pickup trucks and transport trucks. And if you find one in good condition, well, there you are. Parking brake. You just wrap it around your handlebars around the brake, kind of get it to the right size, cut it, tie a knot, and then you’ve got a parking brake. And I went out the other day and I found a couple of old tire tubes, a very thin one and a very thick one. And I don’t know which one is best because you sort of need the right combination between power, like strength and flexibility. Not everyone will work. So, I’m going to experiment a little bit here. I’m hoping this one will work. And I can just tie a knot. And there it is. Or you can double it up, which I’ve done in the past. And then you get two of them. Much stronger, but much harder to separate. So you can use something like that, or you can just go to your local hardware store, find yourself a bungee cord, and maybe a bungee cord will do the job, right? I find they’re not really strong enough. They don’t have as much stretch in them, but you might find one that works perfectly well. So, what I’m going to do right now is just fiddle around a little bit and see if this will work as a parking brake, and then I mean, I don’t need to show you. All I’m going to do is take a pair of scissors, cut it, tie a knot, and then I’m going to see whether it works. I’ll come back to the video when I’m all done with my DIY project here. And there it is. A very quick down and dirty parking brake. I used the thin inner tube. Tied a knot in it. And now you can see it is holding the brake handle in place. And as you can see, my bike is heading straight downhill, but the front wheel is completely locked and my bike can’t go anywhere. So, even if I take it off the kickstand, you can see that the parking brake is holding the bike from rolling forward. And this may or may not be the final version for me. Feels like it’s not quite strong enough, but for purposes of demonstration, I’m just going to go with this one for now. I still have all of my stuff here. So, I’m just going to use this one for a little bit, play around with it, try to get it dialed in. And here, let me show you exactly how you apply it. There are two tricks to making one of these and applying it. One is that this part, the part that’s holding your brake handle, that has to be really short, much, much shorter than you might think. And you have to leave a tail because you need something to hold on to. So, now that I have the parking brake applied, if I want to remove it, I grab the tail and pull down. That’s it. There’s my brakes just as normal. And now what I want, you can see as soon as I took off the parking brake, my bike just started to roll forward and was going to crash into my GoPro. So, now to apply the parking brake, all you do is pull in the handle. My brakes, pull on this tail, wrap it around, and let go. And there you are. You’ve applied your parking brake. I can feel it that this isn’t strong enough right now. You need to get a really strong pull. As strong as you can make it. And this needs to be a little bit tighter. So, I’m going to move the knot up a little bit and give it a little bit more power. And then, as I said, you need that tail because you need something to hold on to cuz this is going to be very strong. And you pull it down, swing it over, and lock it into place. Just like that. So, there you have it. The parking brake. And you can see that it’s preventing my bike from rolling forward. All right. Let’s see if I can give a little demo of the difference. Let’s see how this works out. So, without the parking brake, you just lower the kickstand, let go of your bike, it’s rolling forward, and over it goes. So, that was a pretty good demo. And now the exact same position. Apply the parking brake like that. It’s not really strong enough yet. I have to make an adjustment there. But you can see it’s still my bike is not rolling forward. Put down the kickstand. Let go of the bike. It doesn’t roll away. And yeah, that’s it. It took me probably I don’t know 2 minutes to cut this inner tube and tie a knot in it and it’ll take me another few minutes to dial it in. As I said, I need to tighten it a little bit. I can feel it. It’s not quite strong enough yet, but a small adjustment and I’ll get there. I’m back at the spot where I started this video and I just have a couple of final points to add. A couple of things that just occurred to me. One is the advantage of using an inner tube over say a bungee cord. I didn’t think of this. I remember running into this in the past, but it just occurred to me now as I’m winding up that this parking brake, it sits on your handlebars permanently. So now when you’re not using it, it’s right here on your handlebars and your hand goes over top of it while you’re riding. So it’s nice to have something smooth and flat, right? And if you put a bungee cord here as your parking brake, then it’s kind of a big thick mound and it kind of gets in the way of your hand placement. So that’s one reason to use an inner tube like this one. And the other inner tube related fact that occurred to me is that, you know, you’ve got an inner tube and it seems to work. Like this seems to be good enough and I cut a piece of it away. What you should do, don’t throw away the extra. Like here, I have the remainder of that inner tube. And of course, your instinct is just to throw it away cuz you don’t need it anymore. But if you don’t mind carrying a little bit of extra weight on your bike somewhere, I would keep it. Stuff it in your tool kit into your pannier bag because this rubber is out in the sun all day long and the rubber gets brittle. So after a while, it’s going to break or it’s going to lose its elasticity. So you have to replace it from time to time. I mean, this will last for months, months, and months. But you still have the original inner tube. You have the extra piece and you can take this off and make a new one. Of course, you don’t have to do that. You can always go looking for a new inner tube, but I always like to keep a little I like to keep spare parts. So, I’d recommend keeping the extra. And you might want to experiment. Maybe you make a mistake with this one. You cut it too short and now you need to make a new one. Well, you still have the old inner tube. So keep it for the future. And that’s it for the demo of what I want to call the patented Planet Doug parking brake. But as I said, I didn’t come up with the idea. I certainly knew about the problem on my very first long bike tours. I kept having trouble with the kickstand for exactly what I demonstrated. I parked the bike and the darn thing would keep falling over. And I was trying to think of a way to fix that. And then I stumbled across this idea on the internet. This was long before YouTube even existed. It was on some sort of a very simple cycling forum where people were posting their journals from cycling around the world. And I read an article, like a journal entry where somebody was talking about, hey, I just came up with this idea for a rubber strap to use as a parking brake. And that just set off bells in my brain. It’s like, whoa, that is an amazing idea. I tried it out for myself and I’ve used one pretty much ever since. So that’s it. I hope somebody out there found that information and that demo interesting. And as always, shutting down and I’ll see you in the next video.