- [James] Yes! Victory is ours, Tom! The greatest rollers ever created!
♪ [music] ♪
- [Tom] Rollers are great for training but they can cost quite a lot,
£100 or $160. So, here's how to make a set of rollers
for just £20 or $32. Behind me is GCN's head of engineering, James.
He's going to show us how it's done.
- Can you bunny hop off, Tom?
So you will need, to construct your roller masterpiece, 2 pieces of 4x2,
which is 10cm x 5cm, if you're working on metric.
Six of these right angle brackets, a puncturer packet, an inner tube,
a couple of cheese lids, 3 rolling pins. These are basic IKEA rolling pins but you
can if you want to upgrade to slightly wider rolling pins which will make your
rollers easier to ride on, or get some with stainless steel bearings which will
make them smoother and possibly slightly less flammable.
- James, I'm guessing this one is going to need a bit more than
just a set of Alan keys.
- Tom, this is very serious. It involves saws. You've got to not cock around.
Well, first and foremost, most importantly, we need a pencil, which lives
behind your ear. You'll need a tape measure, a drill, a screwdriver,
a saw, and a pair of scissors.
- Well then, James, let's get started.
- Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to cut our pieces of 4x2
down to being 150cm or 5ft long.
- How do you arrive at that? Do you vary it depending on your bike?
- It's pretty much the same depending on whatever bike you've got, unless you've
got an absolutely enormous bike or a child's bike, you'll be okay
with about 150cm or 5ft. Most moderns saws have got a 90° angle on
them so it's pretty easy to work out where you need to cut so you just put it against
your line there, draw a line across,
- That's going to get a pro tip graphic.
- Turn your piece of wood over, draw another line like that. There we go.
- Now we cut here. So, just to recap, you want to cut your lengths of 4x2 into
two pieces of 150cm or 5ft.
- Right. Now we need to work out how wide the frame needs to be so you can fit your
rollers in. Okay, we've got our piece of wood here. We need to make sure it's not
that close because then our rolling pin won't turn. These rolling pins have
conveniently got handles on that are a little bit concave, so if things kind of
work out. But it's about that far. Then just measure the distance there,
which in this case is 17 1/2cm and then cut some of our spare wood,
that we had from our lengths we were making there,
to be the widths that we're after.
- Let's do it.
- So here we go. We have our basic space for our roller. Like a box.
So in my box of screws, I have got a variety of screws. We're going to be using
some 4 inch or 10cm long screws to screw the frame together. I highly recommend
using good quality screws which are in fact self tapping and have got maybe a
little bit of a cutting edge on them, because it means you don't have to
predrill, Tom. So you need two screws per corner to make sure the whole thing
doesn't twist and fall apart. So you'll put one in the top here and
one in the bottom.
- Prop that in the top there on that end.
- Cool. We've got a frame, Tom. - Let's get it rolling.
- Right, next up, we need our rolling pins. So we've got our basic frame,
we've had a little joust with our rolling pins, so now we need to actually attach
them onto the frame, but before we do that, we're going to need to sort out our
cheese. So because we're using an inner tube as our drive from the rear roller to
the front roller, we need a way of stopping the inner tube from
falling off the side. So, Mike, our challenger, has very kindly brought in his
lunch. So we are going to slightly cannibalize Mike's lunch and turn it into
something that stops the inner tube falling off the edge here.
So, if you grab that one, let's sort of pull the edges off a bit.
Don't have to be too careful about it. Do have to be careful of your fingers though.
So we need to put one of these on the rear roller.
We'll be using a 29-inch inner tube.
And we'll need one on the front. So basically we need two rolling pins with
these stuck on them. You could use a bit of cereal box as well.
What you've done there is you've increased the resistance.
- Vegetable sandwich.
Sort of.
- Easy now. To attach our drive chain, our drive system, which is an old inner tube
what we need to do is take an old inner tube, or a brand new inner tube,
and then chop the valve off.
- Here's one I made earlier.
- Wicked.
- We removed the valve, so we cut around it then we patched
over the hole that's left.
- We're going to keep this pin quite close to the back, here. Now it's time to start
screwing things down.so we've got a right- angle bracket. Give it a bit of a bend and
hold it roughly in place, like that. Get out some screws and start
screwing everything together.
Okay, so the second roller, we're going to put 30cm or a foot
away from the center of this roller here. And that gives you just the right distance
between the two for most bike wheels to fit in so that it will be moving the
rollers around. Of course, if you don't trust us that a foot or 30cm is the right
distance, you can always just pop your bike in and check that it is right.
But it is.
So that's all spinning smoothly. For this bike, Tom,
we're going to need to put the roller, just drop that down, about there.
Because if we have it too far forwards, it will drop out the back.
Probably the easiest way to do this, would be to screw in one side of these first,
then we can stretch the band over it, and then screw in the other side of it so it
will be held in place.
- Do you want the band over now? - No.
We can put our band through like that, and stretch it in place.
If you make a bit of a mistake on how far across you've got something,
just undo it a bit and give it a tap. DIY Mavericks. Just move the roller band
across a bit. Yes! Victory is ours, Tom! So these rollers won't be anywhere near as
good as a set you could buy from the shop. They've got a lot of resistance,
They're basically all around rubbish, but you can build a set of rollers for £20.
Now, we'd love to hear from you guys to see how you think we can improve these,
what we can do better, how we can stop them catching fire, because with the power
Tom puts out, they might fall apart. So share them with your friends.
Let us know what it is you think we can do to make these rollers better in the
comments down below.
Bloody hell. - Pretty in pink
- For more of GCN's bike hacks, click up there.
- To subscribe to GCN, click on James.
- To train on your rollers, click over there.