Bike racks

wrote:

I once went on a Scout camp, and allowed my bike to be transported on
a very large, homemade hitch rack. It had room for ten bikes (no
kidding!), and performed fine until we turned off the paved road onto
the bumpy dirt one, which is when it broke and dumped all ten bikes on
the ground. Fortunately, we were riding home on the bikes the next day.
This is not to say that your hitch rack will do this to you. This
one, as I said, was home-made and heavily loaded. Still, it's
instructive as a physics lesson. There are a lot of leverage forces at
work on a hitch rack, so it's all the more important to get quality.

No doubt ten bikes exceeded the tongue weight limit of the hitch, but it
sounds like the hitch was made out of the wrong materials. The hitch
racks I have are all made of heavy gauge steel that I doubt anyone
making a home made rack would have the tools to work with. When I
shortened the length of the piece that goes into the hitch receiver on
one hitch rack it was quite a chore to drill a hole through it, wrecking
several drill bits in the process. Sawing it wasn't that hard with a
chop saw, but the chop saw blade wore down quite a bit from it.

On Dec 1, 11:23*pm, "Leo Lichtman" wrote:

*You would have been better off using the trailer hitch as a
trailer hitch, and hauling the bikes on a trailer.

Which brings up a shortcoming of trailer hitch racks: Some of us use
those things to haul trailers! Do hitch racks exist that still allow
towing? If so, the tongue weight limitations would be worrisome.

In the past, I've gone with a roof rack and/or a strap-on tailgate
rack. Then I found these http://tinyurl.com/yhq3gp4 work inside our
Pontiac Vibe if I remove the bike seatposts and saddles.

My current solution is to carry folding bikes when traveling with a
trailer.

- Frank Krygowski

"Frank Krygowski" wrote (clip) Do hitch racks exist that still allow
towing? If so, the tongue weight limitations would be worrisome. (clip)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A typical hitch rack plugs into a square socket that is mounted to the
chassis. If you want to tow a trailer, you would have a separate plug-in,
with a hitch ball on it. I don't think any commercial setup exists which
allows the simultaneous use of a hitch call and a bike rack, but such a
thing could certainly be fabricated. It would bring up issues like
allowable tongue weight, but more importantly: how are the bikes going to
mesh with the trailer tongue, and with the trailer itself during sharp
turns?

Bikes on a hitch rack put more than their actual weight on the "hitch," due
to the fact that they are hung out there on a cantilever support. Ten bikes
on a hitch rack probably weigh close to 300 lb, but due to the cantilever
physics, they apply considerably more than that to the hitch. If you tried
to pull a loaded trailer together with a rack full of bikes, it's asking for
several kinds of trouble.

I LOVE the ease of carrying folding bikes inside the car. When I'm going
someplace where I know parking is going to be difficult or expensive, I put
one of my folders in the car and park a mile or two down the road.

Leo Lichtman wrote:

A typical hitch rack plugs into a square socket that is mounted to the
chassis. If you want to tow a trailer, you would have a separate plug-in,
with a hitch ball on it. I don't think any commercial setup exists which
allows the simultaneous use of a hitch call and a bike rack,

There are such bike racks on the market, i.e.
"http://www.rvstuffusa.com/4biketowingcarrierbyswagman.html"
"http://www.premiermotoring.net/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/st_main.html?p_catid=1597"