Bolting Down the Motorcycle Wheel Dock

Updated June 15, 2022 to include pictures

June 3, 2022

You often read about Bruce and the things we do. This post was written by Bruce on Facebook and I thought I would share it.

“I don’t think I’ve posted about our mobile adventures in a while, so here goes. One problem we’ve encountered is that with rough enough roads, the motorcycle wheel dock can jerk to the side, twisting the front wheel and making the bike fall sideways into the walls. The garage is too small for the bike to fall over completely, but it’s still not good. I tried tightening the straps even more, compressing the suspension, and holding the bike down front and back, but the dock would still slide. So yesterday I started bolting the dock to the garage floor and finished the project today. I finished a project! I positioned the dock, carefully measuring on all sides, then started drilling into the floor through the four holes the dock has for this purpose. I then moved the dock out of the way and finished the holes. The front ones went through the floor (about 1.5″ of plywood with thin layers above and below), but the rear ones abruptly stopped. I checked under the rig, and sure enough, those had run into structural members, tube steel across the RV. So I switched to one size smaller drill, drilled through the steel, and got out my tap & die set, tapping (putting in internal threads) into them. For the front holes, I drilled out a piece of flat aluminum stock to go on the underside of the floor and tapped one of those holes as well. I used fender washers on all four bolts at the top, and put silicone under that to seal it. On the front two, I have fender washers and nuts under the aluminum bracket. And all four bolts have thread lock on them. That dock shouldn’t move again until someone really torques on the bolts. Just in time for our next move, Saturday.”

I did help Bruce out by drilling the second hole through the flat aluminum stock while he held it up underneath the RV.