So, last week my beloved bike was destroyed spectacularly is a late night hit and run that involved 2 parked cars, my parked bike, and a semi. My bike was wrapped around a telephone pole. So it’s dead.
When I discovered the wreck hours after it happened there was a woman taking pictures of the awesome looking smashed car that had awesomely smashed my bike. I talked to her and she offered to give me an old bike of hers. Awesome! So now I have a bike again, with a promise to pay it forward, and I’m ready to ride.
Thing is, my bike was my only mode of transportation and I used it to carry groceries, cases of beer, huge stacks of library books, etc, using a milk crate attached to one of these. The new bike, however, looks something like this, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to attach a platform type rack at the base of the seat, as I did with my old bike.
Any ideas on how I can give my new bike the cargo space that my old bike had?
There are TONS of different racks, actually very, very similar to the one you used to have. They usually come with all sorts of different hardware so you can fiddle around and get a configuration that works for your bike.
I have a mountain bike, so I also found it awkward to get a rack that worked. I use one sort of like this one, but where the front brackets usually attach to the rear of the bike, I had to use the hardware in away that allowed me to attach them to a clamp-thingy that goes around the seat post instead.
Full time biker here, no car. First, be aware that post racks won’t hold anything like the amount of weight of a conventional rack. Certainly not, say, a case of beer. Consequently, a trailer is the right answer. I have a good one (a Burly cargo trailer), but that’s indeed probably more than you can afford (costs more than the bike you linked). What you probably could score, though, is a used kid’s trailer being pensioned off at someone’s garage sale. The advantage is that most of them are designed to attach to the rear triangle of the frame and, so, will work on suspension bikes. If you have a choice of trailers, go with the narrowest one, as that’ll work better in traffic.
I suppose this is obvious, but if there’s a good bike shop around, you could ride over and see what they have – you’ll be able to tell if it fits right there. As long as the bike has a way to attach the upright supports near the wheel hub, then you could probably rig up something to attach the forward part to the seat stays (near the brake) or even the seat tube. If, however, there’s no way to attach the rack near the hub, then you’re SOL. Time to either get a trailer, or a used 10-speed.
And I bet if you want to reveal where you are, you might get a recommendation for a good shop.
I think that what I’m going to do is get the cheapo post rack and take my old rack that went down to the spokes, attach that to the spoke hub and lash the two together with a bunch of those plastic thingys that are used as handcuffs. I suppose that sounds like a dumb idea, but I think it might work. If not, then I might have to find another way to do my beer hauling.
I’m working on a very low budget, somewhere around zero, and I can’t afford a different bike or a trailer. I have to make due with what I have. But I promise to not try to carry really heavy stuff if I’m not 100% confidant that it will hold. The most important thing for me is to be able to carry a bag of groceries.
I like in Minneapolis, where you can’t swing a cat without hitting a bike shop. I’m going to take it to Scallywags today to have them look at the bike and make sure it’s rideable, and I may head down to the Hub to see what they have in the way of racks. I like bike co-ops.
Since you don’t really need the rear suspension, maybe you can get the shock locked out. If not, consider welding it or replacing it with a steel rod so it doesn’t move. Once the rear triangle is rigid, you’ll have better luck with making a standard rack work.
I recently attached a rack to my mountain bike. The bike you now have does have eyelets on the rear drop-outs, right? Practically all bikes have those. The problem I had was attaaching the rack to the seat stays. What I did was use P-clips to wrap around the seat-stays of the frame. Unfortunately the front arms of the rack wouldn’t reach these directly so I cobbled together an extension using the best thing I could find in the local hardware shop: metal repair plates for wood joints. (These consist of about a 3" x 3/4" thin metal plate with four screw holes drilled through.)
I can’t upload photos at the moment, but the basic set-up is:
rack rack arm
V V
_____|___ //\\
| \~~~P/ <--- metal plate attached to clamp around seat stay
| // \\
| // \\ //
| //________\\//
*/___________O
^ ^
rear dropout bottom bracket
Keep an eye on freecycle.org. You never know when something like a kid’s trailer might show up. Freecycle.org is a board for posting stuff you have, don’t need, and want to give away for free.
Cobbling together the two racks isn’t going to work if the rear suspension is active. The rack attached to the rear triangle (near the rear hub) is going to move in relation to the rack attached to the seatpost when the suspension moves. In order to make that work you need to deactivate the suspension. You can do this by locking out the shock (possible, depending on the shock), by welding the shock so it doesn’t move, or replacing the shock with something like a steel rod or bar that can’t compress. Should be pretty easy and cheap to do.
