X-Tools Home Mechanic Prep Stand and Workshop Mat

The X-Tools Home Mechanic Prep Stand does more or less what it says on the tin, and at a tidy price for the budget-conscious home user.

First impressions are good - the legs and poles are made from a goldy-brownish alloy, and look quite pro, as do the black resin and alloy fittings. Everything feels solid and the 4.4kg weight is spot on - enough heft to feel up to the job while not being too heavy to cart about.

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Folded up, the stand is pretty compact – a metre tall, and 25cm across at its widest – easily slingable into even a small car boot. It will stand in a corner no problem, with a wall to lean on. Unfolding takes less than 10 seconds, with three quick release clamps to tighten and it's ready to go. The head is fixed to the upper telescoping pole, which is keyed into the lower pole so it cannot rotate, aiding solidity and removing a possible cause of play.

The clamp centre height is 1.5m at its tallest, meaning a large-ish frame clamped at the bottom of the seatpost will sit with the rear mech about 1m off the ground, level with the shifters for ease of actuation as you pedal. That's not overly tall, and if you are towards the Skylab end of the home mechanic height spectrum you might find bending over for prolonged fettling to be a pain in the lower back.

The party trick of the X-Tools stand is the teeth that lock the clamp head rotation. Unlike pretty much every other clamp design that relies on friction, the teeth on the head and clamp intermesh to lock the rotation in a shark's-tooth-like grip – there is simply no way a bike is rotating once the head is in place. The teeth are engaged by a lever at the rear – a 180-degree twist and the clamp springs out just enough to let the teeth disengage, so you can spin the bike to the desired orientation and twist the lever back 180. The lever itself flips over, so no matter which hand you're using or the direction you reach through the bike to get at it, you can always get leverage. It's a cunning design.

The clamp itself is rubberised, with an 85mm-long set of jaws operated by a stubby cam lever that also spins to adjust the clamping distance. The jaws open a maximum of 58mm, the action of closing the lever decreasing the clamp space by 18mm. As with many low-cost clamp designs, the simple closing of the lever/cam does not secure the seatpost – you need to first twist the lever three times, then close it to provide sufficient clamping force. What this means is that once you insert your seatpost there's a bit of trial and error to get the distance right, then wind the lever thrice and clamp down, allowing the lever to cam over into the locked position. Of course you also have to unwind the handle three times when removing the seatpost from the clamp too.

If you only work on the one diameter of seatpost you'll never have to adjust it again; get the opening distance just right, insert post, three turns and clamp. If, however, you wrangle a veritable plethora of tubage you'll need to re-set the spacing each and every time. This isn't overly-onerous, but if you have a few heavy bikes in your fleet you'll have to support their weight with one hand while faffing with the handle. This may or may not be your bag, and if you're trying to quickly turn around multiple bikes in a race scenario this is probably not the stand you're looking for. The moving side of the clamp jaw is double-hinged, to accommodate pretty much all sizes of post or (shudders) tubing. If you find yourself compromised by shortness of seatpost and need to clamp a top tube there's a channel in the centre of the clamp for a single cable (top or bottom of the tube) to feed through.

For a clamp with so many moving parts there's a discernible but not unseemly amount of play in the overall package. Again, once you get the clamping distance right the cam lever does the job of locking it down. Certainly the quality is quite a large step beyond the Everyman budget home workstand, £30 courtesy of your favourite Germanic discount retailer.

The stability of the X-Tools stand relies on a virtual tripod formed by the base of the pole plus the feet at the end of the two legs. There's 2cm of clearance under the legs so stability on rough surfaces might be hit/miss over a traditional tripod arrangement. The virtual tripod legs are 55cm to the left and right under the clamp, and only 40cm to the rear. This means that compared with other designs with legs up to 68cm long, where you can also spin the head left or right to adjust the bike's centre of gravity relative to the legs, in this case you get what you're given. This can result in an unstable, tippy experience if you don't pay attention, and is the major drawback to this V-legged design - a quasi-Orwellian case of three legs good, two legs bad.

Once you are practised in the foibles of bike centre-of-gravity, frame angle and force applied, it's a perfectly reasonable maintenance proposition. X-Tools doesn't list any maximum weight, but there was no issue holding an elderly full-suspension mountain bike the right way up. Don't expect to be holding any full-size bike at odd angles, though, due to the aforementioned stability limitations.

Included in this £90 RRP package is a black plastic mat measuring 90 x 208cm, trimmed in blue. It's a few grades up from IKEA carry-bag type woven plastic, and comes in its own carrybag with handle. It's handy for working indoors, or outside where there's risk of dropping bits into grass or mud. Or as something to stand on to get changed at a race. At RRP is it worth the extra £10 though? That will depend on where you need to work, and how accepting housemates are of filth-infused WD-40 on the parquet flooring.

Untested in this review is the optional tool tray for £13. There are two holes in the height-adjustment collar for it to fit into.

So there are limitations in the clamp design and stability, but the head locking is genius, the materials used look shiny and corrosion-resistant, the weight is right and it folds up as small as can be expected. For around £65 (not including mat), is it twice the value of the Aldi/Lidl alternative? Yes, definitely, and then some. If you simply cannot countenance paying more for a workstand, spend the £100 you'll save on some decent T-head hex keys, a torque wrench or any other critical tools you don't yet own and haven't managed to slip under the spousal radar.

If you only work on a few bikes, and only do so once or twice a week, the X-Tools stand will do you right, caveats understood. If you're running a fleet of bikes and fettling daily, though, the shortcomings will frustrate.

Verdict

If you only work on a few bikes, and only do so once or twice a week, the X-Tools stand will do you right, caveats understood