C 400 GT: How Do You Raise The Front Wheel (e.g., For Tire Change)?

wspollack

Active member
Does anyone have any suggestions for getting the front wheel of a C 400 GT off the ground, as if for changing the tire?

Actually, I just want to make it easier for myself to spin the wheel, as I'm still investigating possible ways to add an external TPMS (see my thread https://www.bmw-scooters.com/index.php?threads/c-400-gt-anyone-figure-out-a-way-to-add-a-tpms.2487/ if you're curious about that). I mean, is there an appropriate location to place a hydraulic jack, the sort of thing I own, and have used, to lift a car to swap seasonal tire-and-rim combinations? Or maybe jack stands (which I don't have) underneath the bottom ends of the front fork tubes, if jack stands go that low?

I mean, certainly we have some members who (unlike me) change their own tires, right?

I did some searching of the forum, by the way, and didn't find anything relevant. Thanks for any help.
 

Pappy13

Active member
Place bike on center stand, use small hydrolic floor jack with short piece of lumber (enough to span frame) and jack scooter (as far forward as possible in front of center stand) until rear tire touches pavement, you want the three points of contact (rear tire, 2 legs of center stand) to steady the scoot, the floor jack is to transfer the weight to the rear tire.
 

wspollack

Active member
Place bike on center stand, use small hydrolic floor jack with short piece of lumber (enough to span frame) and jack scooter (as far forward as possible in front of center stand) until rear tire touches pavement, you want the three points of contact (rear tire, 2 legs of center stand) to steady the scoot, the floor jack is to transfer the weight to the rear tire.
Thanks for the reply.

Just to clarify, because I don't see what I would call a frame member (or members): you're saying it's okay to put some wood up against -- and then some pressure on -- this area underneath the scoot:

2022-08-21_09-01-53.JPG

That's a pic, looking up from the ground, from the throttle side of the C 400 GT, with the centerstand over on the left in the pic (and a snowblower wheel in the background).
 

Pappy13

Active member
Yes, there isn't much weight on the lumber, you're just "tilting the bike" not lifting it, you'll want to stop well before you start lifting the centerstand.
 

wspollack

Active member
@Pappy13: Thanks again for your suggestion, which may help out someone down the road, if he or she is actually interested in changing tires, for instance.

In my case, I was at a Harbor Freight store this afternoon, and dropped $30 on a cleaning dolly sort of thing they have. This worked out okay for me, for my purpose of being able to easily spin the front wheel:

2022-08-23_15-36-59.JPG

(Unfortunately, in terms of my quest of installing a TPMS sensor up front, the news was worse than I thought. But that's a story for another day, another thread.)
 

sdan45

New member
@Pappy13: Thanks again for your suggestion, which may help out someone down the road, if he or she is actually interested in changing tires, for instance.

In my case, I was at a Harbor Freight store this afternoon, and dropped $30 on a cleaning dolly sort of thing they have. This worked out okay for me, for my purpose of being able to easily spin the front wheel:

View attachment 3463

(Unfortunately, in terms of my quest of installing a TPMS sensor up front, the news was worse than I thought. But that's a story for another day, another thread.)
I may have to pick one of those up. I've been lifting the front wheel with my hands and turning it, that's getting old pretty fast.
 

wspollack

Active member
I may have to pick one of those up. I've been lifting the front wheel with my hands and turning it, that's getting old pretty fast.
1) Yeah, when I was done with easily and gently rotating the wheel for my TPMS experimentation, I decided that it was indeed a very useful $30 spent, for my approximately once-a-year wheel cleaning. The item in question is this one:


2) Also after having finished my experimentation, I was thinking about it, and thought that perhaps my placement method was "wheel cleaning stand" for dummies. Or maybe even morons. Let me explain.

Yesterday, I placed the stand in front of the bike, with the ramp facing back toward the bike, as shown in the pic in my original post. I just gently rode the bike up, over, and into the stand, and that worked okay ... if you don't mind then putting the bike on the sidestand, and rotating the wheel in that leaned-over position. But I wanted the wheel straight up, which meant putting the bike on the centerstand. Well, when you do that, the bike rolls backward, completely out of that HF stand. (By the way, that stand conveniently has rubber pads on the bottom, which do indeed keep it from sliding around.)

So I put the bike back on the HF device, and then on its sidestand, and enlisted my wife as my assistant. I asked her to push the HF stand back toward the bike, as I levered it up as slowly as I could onto the centerstand. That is, she should try to maintain the stand's position relative to the bike, i.e., underneath the front tire.

That simply didn't work. I ended up pushing the stand underneath the tire, from the front of the bike, alternating hitting the two front ends of the stand (i.e., NOT the roller part) with a two-pound dead-blow mallet. That worked, but was a nuisance, and took a lot of whacks.

Today, all by myself, I did it the right way, just to prove to myself that I was an idiot.

I put the HF stand behind the front tire, with the ramp facing forward:

2022-08-24_15-03-56.JPG

(And not quite centered behind the front wheel -- more of the stand to the throttle side -- because when you stand the bike upright the center of the tire will move over to the right.)

Then, I just straightened up the bike, and put it on the centerstand, i.e., as one would normally do it. This worked very well, and put the wheel almost centered in the valley between the two rollers:

2022-08-24_15-04-47.JPG

The wheel was pretty easy to rotate that way, but not quite as easy as it could be, if it were properly resting in that valley. So I took just a couple whacks on each side with the mallet again, and the positioning was finished:

2022-08-24_15-06-58.JPG

Once again, the wheel was a breeze to rotate. As I say, good for cleaning (which I didn't do, because my year's not up yet).

By the way, getting the bike off of that stand was the same as usual, in terms of getting off the centerstand, except it took an extra, purposeful, oomph to do it. But the HF stand remained in place, and we're back to what the situation looked like in that first pic.

Hope this helps.
 
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