so, tried one of the axiom streamliner rear racks and it was a piece of shit. either it was welded up crooked or they are all junk. i could adjust it to have a good amount of clearance on the braze-on-less road bike but with any weight it would work its way down to rubbing the tire.
this led me on a search of rear racks that do not require braze-ons. other than the axiom i have found one other company to make them but i lost the link because the racks are +$100 and the ‘adapter’ is like $40. fuck that.
this led me to start thinking about mounting a rack with some p-clamps but that seems kinda ghetto. i have a hard enough of a time getting fenders to stay in place with p-clamps and i can imagine a rack being a complete disaster. i’d also like to be able to remove the rack pretty easily when i don’t need to haul shit with me. bending p-clamps over the frame each time will probably break them over time.
any ideas? maybe a clamp that bolts on to the stays other than a p-clamp? or some other adapter type of thing that will make a standard fender work without braze-ons? maybe another company that makes a braze-on-less rear rack thats not retarded expensive? would like to hold panniers, so no seat post mounted racks. this is for both my masi speciale 105 and my new iro model 19.
P-clamps work really well. If they’re not clamping tight enough, shim them with a piece of inner tube. If they’re still not clamping tight enough, they’re too big. I carried shit tons of weight on an Axiom rack attached at the top with P-clamps on my old bike. P-clamps cost like $5-$10. If someone wants more for them, don’t fall for it.
Axiom racks are really functional. Kind of ugly, but I kind of doubt that a more expensive rack would give me anything that my Axiom doesn’t, except lighter weight, but who cares?
well, i have a couple racks in the garage. i’ll try some hardware store p-clamps and see how that goes… the reason i want to stay away from p-clamps is i want a rack that’s easy to remove when its time to shred.
For sure, but p-clamps are easy enough to remove, and anything easier (except for braze-ons) would probably require you to sacrifice a lot of functionality.
Edit: If you wanted easy on/off, you could just leave the p-clamps on all the time and just take the rack off when you weren’t using it and leave the p-clamps bolted down hella hard while you tear shit up on the trails.
I think the bottom line is, there are just some combos that aren’t going to work. Strong, easily removeable rear rack on a bike with no braze-ons for rear rack is one of those combos.
is one that clamps to the seatpost out of the question?
topeak makes some.
edit: just read the last sentence of your post saying no seatpost clamp racks.
but ill leave it in case this option is helpful to someone else. it would have helped me a week ago when i was looking for one like this.
go to a store or bike coop or someplace with a ton of rear racks in stock
i probably have 5-10 rear racks in my basement, and none are by any means a “universal” fit- some fit better on some bikes than others.
the blackburn style rear rack is probably the closest to a universal fit- you can bend the two flexible stays to fit around your seat stays, or bend them up/down depending on frame size/geometry, or run one single stay to the rear brake bridge or a seatpost clamp.
You can get some really cheap racks that mount on to the axle, they’ll probably cost $10-15. A good LBS probably won’t stock them, go to the family-oriented bike store or department store. Ugly as a hatful of dicks, but I s’pose they work well enough.
If you’ve got a bike co-op nearby they probably have hundreds of them as lots of boom-era bikes from the 70s had them. They’ll probably give you one for a dollar or two.
Old Man Mountain makes racks that mount to the QR and canti posts or P clamps, not easily removable, but I thought I would post in case it met someone else’s needs:
[quote=biekrider]go to a store or bike coop or someplace with a ton of rear racks in stock
i probably have 5-10 rear racks in my basement, and none are by any means a “universal” fit- some fit better on some bikes than others.
the blackburn style rear rack is probably the closest to a universal fit- you can bend the two flexible stays to fit around your seat stays, or bend them up/down depending on frame size/geometry, or run one single stay to the rear brake bridge or a seatpost clamp.
[/quote]
This really is the best cheap solution. OMM has some cool stuff if you want to drop the money on it, but the basic $15 rack and some $1 p-clamps ($5-10 for p-clamps?! HA!) will do what you need well enough. It takes an extra minute to take the rack off, which I bet you’d get tired of doing regardless of the rack mounting system after a couple times.
