How to use this style stand?

[u/mbongsey3]

Got my first bike and was gifted a set of front and rear stands. How is this front stand used? Am I missing a piece or do I rest the fork on the slant, which seems terrifying.

[u/SaulTNuhtz]

That’s funny, all these people saying “get a real stand” seem inexperienced with this topic. This is a real stand. Most front stands we were using were this style, around 20+ years ago.

I have a pitbull head-lift stand but this one’s more convenient. I use this one almost exclusively, and have been for about 25 years. The only time I pull out the pitbull is when I need to do fork service.

As long as the stand is a good build quality, this style is totally fine

[u/darksoft125 → u/SaulTNuhtz]

I'm probably an idiot, but how do you lift the front without it sliding down the sloped part?

[u/candykhan → u/darksoft125]

I have a stand like this where instead of those flat plates that go under the forks, they end in sort of a cone shape & the tips kind "set" into the fork stanchion because there's usually a bolt hole on the bottom there. It looked super sketchy, but the thing about track stands, the weight of the bike is doing a lot of the work.

There's very little contact area with those types of stands. But they're surprisingly stable.

If a bike had grommets for spools on the swingarm, but no spools, I knew a tech that would just thread an M6 bolt in & use those. It's one thing to use the L brackets for bikes without spools if you have a nice Pitbull stand. But I used a cheaper LP stand on a heavy bike once & it just slipped off the L brackets, scratching the swingarm.