Today, I made a bike rack!
For a long time, I’ve wanted to have a roof rack to cart my bike around. I didn’t want a trunk-mount rack because you always have to put it on and take it off when you want to use it, it’s held on by little webbing straps that are safe at first but eventually get weak and brittle, and you have to take all of your bikes off if you want to get into the back of your car. I didn’t really want a hitch-mount rack because they are expensive, they get in the way of you opening and closing the back of your car, and you have to put it on and take it off every time you want to use it. I loved the idea of the roof rack because it’s never in the way of anything and you can leave it on all the time. The problem with roof racks is that they are expensive. To carry two bikes, you’re looking at spending $200+ for the cheapest ones. Even if you buy them used, you end up paying like $150, which is more than I wanted to spend. I’ve had a lot of different ideas of making my own roof rack, but they all involved causing irreparable harm to our crossbars, and I like our crossbars so I didn’t want to ruin them. I finally had this idea about a week ago when we went to California to visit the Greenwoods. We borrowed a cartop luggage carrier from our friends (Janson and Tara Evans) and it was secured by a couple of U-bolts. I realized that U-bolts would work perfectly for my bars and so I went to Home Depot when we got home and bought some U-bolts and then ordered some fork mounts on amazon:
The 4 U-bolts were like $3 each and the 2 fork mounts were $18 each, so I paid a total of about $48 for everything. My plan was to make a simple fork mount rack by fastening each fork mount to two U-bolts. The first problem that I ran into was that the holes in the fork mounts were smaller than the U-bolts. I decided to just bore out the holes in the fork mounts so that they would fit onto the U-bolts.
Now I just had to mount it onto our roof rack. I was planning on putting the mounts on the front of the U-bolts, so I got the back nuts down to the bottom of the thread first. Then, I put the mounts on and tightened the nuts until the mount was snug and didn’t move around.
After I took this picture I ended up flipping one of the mounts around so that it was behind the front bolts because the wheelbase of my road bike is about 2” shorter than the wheelbase of my mountain bike. I may get the bolts cut down at some point, but it’s not a priority right now. I put my road and mountain bikes on just to see if they were stable. The road bike didn’t rock at all, but the mountain bike did a little, because the mountain bike weighs about 15 pounds more than the road bike. It shouldn’t be a problem because there is no way the mount is coming off, but I probably will get a couple of extra metal plates and throw them on just to reinforce it and make it bomb-proof. Now that the forks were set, I needed to figure out what to do with the back tires. I remembered that Emily and I both have chalk bags for climbing that came with these simple webbing straps with clips on them to strap them around your waist. We always just clip our bags onto our harnesses (or belt loops when we’re bouldering) so we don’t ever use the straps. I took the straps and cinched them down around the wheel and crossbar, and then tied them to the side-rail to prevent the back tires from sliding inward.
Webbing and clips are pretty cheap if you don’t already have them lying around, and you don’t even need to do what I did. You could use anything really to secure the back tire: small bungee cords, an old rope, zip-ties, twine, etc. That’s it, though. The main thing is just to make sure that the U-bolts you use will work for the crossbars you already have and make sure that the mounts are tight on the crossbars. Other than that it’s pretty hard to mess this up. It only took me about an hour for the whole project from start to finish, and the price is super-affordable. If you’re only doing one rack, you can pay less than $25.
Whoa man.
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