@mcneese.chad roger that, thanks for the org update!! I appreciate it!!
@TrekCentury yeah, so what I do personally is I just got one of those super strong but very thin & foldable shower curtains (PVC? Not sure. Not the thick ones that are a pain to fold! And it’s lasted 4 years of pretty heavy use, strong as heck.) and cut it to size to fit under the trainer (as in tucks in & out, with no need to lift the trainer at all).
I then can pop that in and out super easy, so when I pop it OUT and fold it and put it away, the bike is just on the trainer, on the hardwood floor.
So two big things: 1 - It looks at least sorta decent as a display pc. (If you keep the bike clean & trainer dusted.) It at least doesn’t look awful! 2 - It takes up a much much smaller footprint than a bike ON a trainer mat. Important if this is sorta right in your living room, office, etc, and you’re going to be walking tightly around it and / or squeezing it as close as humanly possible between two pcs of furniture, etc. For instance, this could be the difference between comfortably fitting a ride station in a hallway, w plenty of room to walk around, vs. way too narrow w a permanent mat under it, etc. (Can always actually move the station when you need to move furniture, etc, up and down the hall, but the other 99% of the time, bike can just live there, no need to disassemble after every ride.)
I used to just have it on some foam squares w steel shims to level it. (Last place was an old 50s home w hardwood. 0.5” = 1 cm off level & shimmed up over just the trainer width! ), as bike was in the back den. But now it will be front & centre, and I want it to look really nice.
Maybe to some the visual diff of feet on cut foam blocks & piles of shims vs just black “factory” feet is minor, but to me, that looks the difference between “Ya, that looks nice, I’m happy w that in the corner of the living room semi permanently” vs “Ew, someone needs to clean that up, looks messy.”
So the idea is feet laser cut out of 1/2” = 1 cm thick steel, as small as possible that spreads the weight out enough that I can slap a thin & unnoticeable pc of non-slip / grip-in-place rubber under it, and paint the top black & boom, “invisible” / looks part of the trainer feet that leave zero wear marks, even on a polished wood floor.
There will be a second slightly smaller circle of 1/4” = 0.5 cm thick steel tack welded on top of the first that has a small laser cut hole just the right size & shape for the feet to sit into, so it’s pretty much impossible for them to slide off.
If the level is off in the trainer spot, shim it to level, have the shims laser cut to match, tack welded. Hopefully get to entirely skip this step, IF it’s level. I highly doubt it.
Paint it black to match the trainer.
Why all this effort? If your floor is level, MUCH easier. I’d probably skip this all entirely, and just pop the foam blocks in & out easy, with the curtain-mat!!!
But as mentioned, my last place the floor was a levelling nightmare. You did NOT want to move the trainer, even a half inch, or you had to re-level it. You had to double check the level every time you accidentally bumped it 1/2” in any direction, and like 80% of the time, it would be way off again, and you were stuck tap-tapping it back into its magical position!
So want to NOT have to touch it! Just covert mark the spots on the floor, quick dbl check it’s still in place, jump on and GO.
I guess most ppl don’t deal w this problem? No clue. Guess they just have….extra rooms they barely even care about a back corner, etc, to stash a mat? Blows my mind, honestly.
But I DO gather, from all the reading I’ve ever done, that this is just how all trainers are; will damage floors, pretty much all floors, wood, laminate, ceramic, painted concrete, etc, tough luck, use a trainer mat.
It just makes no sense. It makes it such a pain to do all this after market, just to get the trainer we paid ____ for to not damage our floors, when the solution is so bloody easy and low cost from a mfg standpoint.
Clarify edit: I’ve not lost my noodle, here, chasing absolute & unattainable perfection. As mentioned, my last place was 1/2” / 1 cm out over the trainer width; about 24” / 60 cm ish. That bike is WAY out of level, like 5-10 deg. I’m not chasing a +/- 0.5 deg off perfect level!!! Jeez, I mean, I have a book shelf already in the new place that took about 1/2” of shims to come to level just over its front to back depth of like 12” / 25 cm!! The tower of Pisa is straighter than that!!