Making Up A Useful Hydraulic Jack for BMW motorcycles

Making A Useful Hydraulic Jack for help in servicing your BMW Airhead motorcycle, CHEAP!

To make a very useful jack for all sorts of work on your BMW Airhead motorcycle:
          Purchase the smallest, cheapest, hydraulic bottle jack at your nearest auto-parts store. For the best versatility, if you have a choice, get a short one, and be sure the one you get has the screw top that extends upwards. The boxes these come packaged in typically list an approximate 6 inches of possible lift movement. In actuality, for the one's I have seen, the hydraulic piston will move a bit under 5 inches. These jacks sell for $10 or so, and every one I have seen is made in China. I have yet to see any leak or otherwise fail.

Unscrew the top threaded part to its upper limit.

Obtain a nice piece, perhaps 2 or 3 inches long, of iron pipe. I suggest the inside diameter of that pipe to be such that after you cut it, it fits, but NOT SNUGLY, at any frame round tubing area that you might use it at.  In particular, the crossover at the forward end of the swing arm seems a good size to have it fit loosely around. A couple of inches or so diameter thus seems OK. Cut the pipe LENGTHWISE to make two halves. I usually do this in the middle, or with a slight bias towards one side.   Clean one of these halves up...that means clean up and round the sharp edges.   Weld this one half to the top of the jack, keeping the top threaded part of the jack cooled with a wrapped water-soaked rag.....weld such that the curved piece will be SQUARELY welded to the top. Again...be SURE it is squarely welded, and don't just tack weld it, weld it all around.

Just one use for this jack would be to jack up the round tubing rear cross-member, to enable you to move the rear tire a bit off the floor.   Very handy when rotating rear tire to rotate engine when setting valves, and many other chores.

You will need a sturdy piece of wood to have the jack high enough. I have found a 1 inch piece of plywood, and a piece of 4 x 6, to be just right for airheads. On one of these many jacks I have modified, I put holes in the corners to enable sturdy mount to studs sticking up from various pieces of wood. Let your imagination work for you.

The picture below contains two recently made jacks. Neither one has the iron pipe as described, because after some begging, I gave my last one away!

The one on the left has a undercut (spot faced depression, hidden from view here) under the milled aluminum piece, and a central hole, and I drilled and tapped the jack top piece. It is way over-fancy. The jack on the right was one I made up in about 10 minutes, crude, and functional. If you make up some sort of jack like these, consider if you need a much larger base, perhaps of heavy metal or maybe a foot square piece of plywood, bolt the jack to it..

One item not shown is that I have pieces of wood that fit the top of these jacks....and make the top of the jack a flat surface...so the jack can be used at places like the oil pan, and not damage the bike.

Note the 12" square in the center, and the ruler below. Both to give you an idea of size. Jack tops are screwed down.

Revisions:
04/13/2003: add .htm title; clarifications
09/06/2003: add photo of two types of these jacks; minor text changes.
02/25/2005: final editing and release

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