Park Tool PRS-25 Team Issue Repair Stand: Quick Review

Park PRS-25 Team Issue Repair Stand: Quick Review- by Grannygear

Editor’s Note: With the off-season upon us in many parts of North America, it might be a good time to give your gravel going steed a once over. This is always made much easier when you have a good, solid repair stand. Bonus points if it is something portable you can take with you to events or on vacations. Grannygear takes a look at one from Park Tool, the veritable inventors of the modern day repair stand for bicycles.

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I do all my own work on our fleet of bikes and I always have. I am a bit of a hands on guy, decent with tools, and I like to have at least a pretty good idea how things work, how they might break, and how to ‘un-break’ them. That is really nice when you are a mountain biker, when mechanical things go wrong, and when you are a helicopter’s ride away from a bike shop.

Back in the day, I bought a bike repair stand because without that you are making it waaaaay harder than it should be. It was a Blackburn model, steel, folding, and it got the job done. But the years have taken a toll on it, with the rubber-ish material in the jaws finally wearing out and some other parts getting a bit loose. I could not see any way to buy parts for it, so it was time for a new work stand. The Blackburn will serve as a standing testament to bygone things, festooned as it is with the decals of past companies, many now in the wind.

Park Tool blue. You know you are an established brand when there is a shade of a color that is part of your company’s signature. Park makes very nice tools and at decent consumer level prices. I have several tools made by them in my tool case and I have an old park shop-level quality wheel truing stand on the bench, so it was the first stop on my journey for a new work stand.

I wanted a few features in the new stand: Stability, portability, a clamp that is faster to tension/release, and a clamp that is versatile enough to use on aero seat posts, etc. Talking with the good folks at Park tools, we settled on the PRS-25 Team Issue Repair Stand. From the website: 

• PRS-25 FEATURES
  -The 100-25D Micro-Adjust clamp grips nearly any tube from 7/8″ to 3″ (23–76mm), including aero tubes
  -360° infinite position clamp rotation
  -The clamp jaws are nominally 2.75 inches (7cm) wide
  -Quickly and easily folds down to 47″
  -Clamping height adjusts up to 60″
  -Proprietary Hexatude hex-shaped aluminum tubing ensures low flex and no rotation
  -Aluminum leg straps ensure all parts slide, fold and unfold together
  -Base when open forms a triangle of 36″ x 36″ x 45″ (92 cm x 92 cm x 115 cm)
  -Weighs just 13 lbs. (6 kg)

NOTE: The maximum weight holding capacity of the PRS-25 is 100 lbs. (45kg). This assumes the weight is centered over the legs.

I have been using it for a few months including a couple of bike builds and lots of bike fiddling, chain lubing, etc. I am quite pleased. It is suitably stable, despite being very light weight. The legs form a triangle shape when deployed and it is more stable than the older, heavier, Blackburn stand. It is not as good as something bolted down to the floor, so if I was doing a lot of heavy bike work like facing/chasing, frame alignment, etc, then this would be a bit less than good, But for general purposes, it is steady.

The clamp is well done, soft enough and channeled a bit so you can work with shaped tubes like aero posts, etc. It is easy to close, first with a cam-over lever that closes the clamp quickly to a 80% or more closed position from fully open, then the closing handle winds down with a light hand cranking, allowing you to ‘sneak up’ on the clamping tension you want. It also makes for a fast release so you are not standing there, ‘unwinding’ a clamp while you hold the bike up with the other hand.

The clamp head is not very tall, so it does a good job of fitting on bikes with very little exposed seat post.

Now I would not be real excited about clamping this on the top or seat tube of a carbon bike. I just would not be all about that. But I suppose you could cradle it in the jaws that way and LIGHTLY close it but…it just takes one mistake and then *pop*.

The legs fold up easily with a quick release lever so the stand shrinks down enough to take to races, etc. It weighs very little, around 13-14lbs, and the clamp head is easily removed from the stand allowing for an even smaller package to store.

I like it and so far I have no complaints. I will say that bikes are becoming harder and harder to ‘clamp’ into a work stand. Aero road bikes with shaped posts and nary a round tube in sight…what do you do with those? There are stands like the Park PRS-22.2 that support the bike by the bottom bracket and one axle end. That might have been a better choice for the future, but so far I have been OK, even across several MTBs with dropper posts, gravel bikes with more traditional seat posts, and road bikes, even ones like my wife’s Trek Emonda SLR.

Park tool PRS-25: So far, it’s blue and true.

Note- Park Tools sent over the PRS-25 Team Issue Repair Stand at no charge to Riding Gravel for test and review. We were not paid, nor bribed, for this review and we strive to always give our honest thoughts and views throughout.

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About The Author: Grannygear hails from SoCal and spent most of his cycling days as a mountain biker from the formative years of mountain biking all the way up to the present day. His day job is in the tech sector, but he has spent time writing about off road 4X4’s, 29″ mountain bikes, and cycling in general. Grannygear and Guitar Ted have worked off and on together since 2009 after a chance meeting at Interbike. With gravel cycling on the rise, Grannygear has been exploring how this genre’ works in SoCal and now does guest pieces for RidingGravel.com in his spare time.

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