Just some quick thoughts and pictures for now as the rack has only been on the bike for a little while. The rack comes in a simple box containing four separate items
- The top rack
- The rack frame
- A bag containing all the mounting brackets and tools required for assembly
- Paper instruction booklet
Setting up the rack on my bike was easy. I have it installed on a full suspension mountain bike tandem ( Ventana El Conquistador de Montañas S&S coupled with Rohloff hub). The only thing I had to change on the bike was moving one of the cable tie mountings for the rear brake. The install probably took me about 30 to 45 minutes but there are videos on youtube of people doing it much quicker. After mounting it looked as follows:
I have the tour version of the rack as I wanted the option of adding panniers at a later date (and I thought the pannier mounting bars would be useful for hooking straps and bungees onto) . There is also a Sport rack version which has exactly the same frame and mounts as the tour version but has a different top plate (it also weights less at 760g versus 990g). For a two day tour I put a tent and two roll mats on the back (pictures above show just the tent, pictures below show the tent with the roll mats). The rack performed perfectly on our two day tour – it didn’t move an inch. People have reported that their racks have moved but I think this would have been because they didn’t tighten the mounting straps up enough. We took the bike down some very rough singletrack and had no problems. We have also taken the bike down some S2 graded alpine single trail with the rack mounted but with no load on it and we didn’t even notice it was there (but our bike is a little heavier than a normal MTB!)
Once I get some more use out of the rack I will post some updates. If you have any questions let me know in the comments.
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