A BikeTrial Beginner's Training Bench

Recently I made a few benches out of wood pallets. I published three posts on what I was doing with those benches and why I would go driving around with my pick-up hunting for abandoned wood pallets (Learning to Pedal-hop up a Bench, Homemade BikeTrial Training Park and FRIM, BikeTrials and Snake Bite?: BikeTrial Progress).









After riding and training on these wood benches, I strongly feel that they are the perfect training accessory that every BikeTrial beginners should get... LOL.

Basically, the bench is about 20" high and 43" long. The width is about 12" at the top and 30" at the base. And so today, I made a short video to demonstrate what one can do with a single bench.



I am pretty sure that anyone else can probably do more than what I have shown in the video... LOL.

To a beginner like me, just repeatedly doing some of the basic moves will cause me to huff and pants like mad... LOL. Although my stamina is improved, there is still a lot of room for improvements... Hahah.

Nevertheless, I do hope that other BikeTrial beginners will make it a point to make one, two or three of these mobile wood benches for their own learning and training.

I am pretty sure that they will also come to appreciate the wood benches like me :-)

Homemade BikeTrial Training Park

On June 14th 2008, about 4 months into starting and learning BikeTrials, I brought home my first stack of wood pallets after attending the Red Bull Sponsored BikeTrial in Seremban, Negri Sembilan.

Soon after that, I started practicing on the wood pallets. I set up some mock sections to learn balancing and pedal hops. Gradually, the sections got bigger as my riding improved. I found more pallets and graduated to higher grounds... LOL. And now I have wood pallets stacked all over my house. Some of the pallets have begun to rot and come apart.... not safe to ride on any more.

I took the old and rotten wood pallets on my pick-up and managed to dump them at a garbage land fill.

Two weeks ago on April 4th, I went hunting for wood pallets around the Nilai 3 warehouses in Negri Sembilan and found plenty!!!


After driving around some of the abandoned warehouses, I came across a huge stack of giant size pallets.


I packed six of them onto my pick-up and took them home.... in two trips... LOL.


I arranged this stack to hopefully use it to learn and practice the difficult side hop.


I sawed up two of the wood pallets and made them into benches, which I will use to practice balancing and rear wheel hop-up and pedal kicks.


I could also use the benches to stack on top of other pallets to create any challenging section I want... LOL.

This coming Sunday, I am planning to go back to Nilai 3 to get more of the giant wood pallets. Currently, I am thinking of making more benches of various heights.

Since the time when I first started out with training on wood pallets, I have not looked back. I would not have been able to learn so many BikeTrial skills or come this far without those wood pallets.

I am very sure that I am not alone in the quest to built a homemade BikeTrial training ground. I have see countless videos on YouTube and Vimeo of riders, pros and otherwise, training right at their own backyard... :-)

And thus... I am really looking forward to this Sunday. Gonna grab some more wood pallets and built me a BikeTrial Training Park... LOL.

Paper Pallets For BikeTrial Training?

Never thought I would be interested in pallets, let alone those that are made of paper, which I thought was pretty damn cool! I saw an advert on this blog that promoted this company called DeFrazer that made compress paper pallets. They have offices in Malaysia and Singapore.

DeFrazer manufactures the Green Pallets, which they described as:

"It is with economically light and high strength quality using recycle paper, glue, and staples (when it is necessary).In addition, the outer layer of GREEN PALLET is made of craft paper and test liner which prevents moisture penetration What is more, we can also include an element that made out GREEN PALLET water proofing. The weight of GREEN PALLET is at approximately 8 to 12 kg which means lighter than wooden (range from 20 to 40 kg), plastic (range from 12 to 45 kg), and metal (more than 50 kg) pallet."

On their web site, they even have a DIY section, where they showed how a Green Pallet can be assembled.

Now if only I can get my hands on a few of these and test them out with my bike. First thoughts are that the Green Pallet will not last. The fact that the bike will pedal scratch and abuse the pallet with constant hammering and knocking, will probably turn the pallet into paper pulps in a couple of weeks... LOL.

As of now, more than half of the wooden pallets I have, had been repaired numerous times. Some of them have been infected with fungus, slowly eating the wood inside out. With the constant rain, the deterioration just gets worse... :-(

I guess it's time to call up my friends in Kepong to reserve some really nice wooden pallets for me... LOL.