Topeak Prepstand eUP Pro

The Topeak PrepStand eUP Pro is a great idea: a high-quality folding workstand with a pneumatic assist for hoiking e-bikes and the like around, but for less than half the price of motorised stands like the Park Tool PRS-33 or Unior Electric Repair Stand. Unfortunately a couple of flaws in the execution make it far less useful than it should be – with a few tweaks it really could end up on our best bike repair stands list, but for now it's a miss.

This stand incorporates a nitrogen-charged cylinder, operated with a foot switch, that provides 17kg of lifting force. For lighter bikes that means you can let the stand do all the work, while for a heavy ebike it's the difference between easily getting the bike into place and grunting and swearing at it.

It's simple to use: you put the bike in the clamp, press the foot pedal and the bike moves up, with a bit of help from you if it weighs more than 17kg. This certainly makes getting up to working height easier. Or it would if the clamp actually dropped low enough to grab a normal bike.

Topeak's video shows a bike clamped by the seatpost with its tyres on the floor being lifted to working height, but to do that you need an exceptionally tall seat post. The top of the clamp is 112cm from the floor; the top of the seatpost on my road bike, by comparison, is 90cm, so the bike still needs to be manually lifted 22cm (just under 9in in old money) before you can start work.

My partner Caroline tried getting her 25kg ebike into the eUP Pro and simply couldn't do it. She's not tall enough or strong enough to lift the whole thing up to the necessary height. I could just about manage, but it certainly wasn't trivial – bear in mind you can only use one hand, as you need the other to work the clamp.

Now, you can do what Topeak's Demo Man does and lift just the back of the bike up to the clamp, leaving the front wheel to take some weight, but Demo Man only gets away with this because he's handling a tall mountain bike with a long front end; a more conventional bike, like two of the ebike hybrids in my family's fleet, aren't tall enough for this to work. So again you just have to hoik them up into the clamp.

Okay, you could get a very long seatpost just for this purpose and fit it so it reaches the lowered clamp, but with 42cm of lift, doing it that way doesn't get the derailleurs up to an easy working height.

This is disappointing. To really make working on heavy ebikes easier, you need to be able to lift them straight from the floor.

The PrepStand eUP Pro does at least fold up easily for transport, and Topeak offers a bag to store and carry it in. At 14kg it's not something you're going to want to chuck around, though.

The build

This stand is very sturdily built from large-diameter aluminium tubes. The two main legs fold out and are held in place with a quick-release clamp. There are two short auxiliary legs to help stabilise it, held in place with large knurled screws, and for storage and transport the clamp removes easily.

Most folding stands are a bit flexible; it's nothing you can't live with, but they're not rigid enough to resist serious welly. This, though, is the stiffest and sturdiest folding stand I've used. I'd be happy to use it to support a bike while I applied a breaker bar to end a 20-year relationship between a frame and bottom bracket.

The clamp

The clamp is very similar to Park Tool's well-regarded Professional Micro-Adjust Clamp in that it has narrow jaws (so you don't need much seatpost showing), grabs tubes from 22.2 to 76.2mm across, and can quickly open wide/close back up with a few spins of a handle.

It's not as easy to use with just one hand as, say, a Feedback Sports clamp, but it's pretty good.

To spin a bike in the vertical plane you loosen the handle on the back of the clamp until the two toothed discs move apart enough that one can turn independently of the other. The axle through this section is really sturdy, so while I was initially worried that it might get damaged when half-open, it doesn't. It's tough.

You'll need plenty of open space around the eUP, however, because the stand doesn't spin around the vertical axis, unlike some with tripod bases. If you're working on one side of a bike, you have to walk round to work on the other side. This is only a problem if your working space is a bit cramped. Mine is, so I'd come to depend on being able to spin a bike round.

Rivals

There aren't any as far as I can see. There are several out there with actual motors, but the cheapest of them, the Goliath Pro+ from Spain, is still almost €2,000 before shipping and customs duties (thanks, Brexit) and you'll still need a base for it.

Who should buy the Topeak PrepStand eUP Pro?

There's a gaping hole in the workstand market between the best manual home-use workstands, such as the Feedback Sports Pro Elite (£350), Unior BikeGator+ (£364.99) and Park Tool PRS-25 (£405), and the electric-assist stands that start at well over two grand. If you have heavy bikes then some sort of assistance is a godsend, but you really need to be able to lift from the floor.

The Topeak PrepStand eUP Pro just can't do that with many bikes, and that's rather disappointing considering the £869.99 price.

Nevertheless, if your fleet includes big mountain bikes and lighter ebikes you should get plenty of use out of it. If you can lift your bikes about a foot with one hand, then the Topeak PrepStand eUP Pro does the rest of the job really well. In truth though, that's a disappointingly narrow use-case.

Verdict

Sturdy workstand with effective lift-assistance, but needs to reach down lower to be truly useful