In which I construct a pannier rack for the back of the bike. Only after which did I find out that this bike is dead. Or maybe not.
Rear pannier mount for the BikeE
My wife and I own two BikeE’s. These are semi-recumbent bikes that were popular (ish) about 25 years ago.
As part of this rehab process (Post #1976), I removed the wire baskets from both bikes, along with their under-seat mounts. They never worked well. And after a couple of decades, the rust adds nothing to their charm.
To replace those, on my BikeE, I mounted a far easier-to-use (and better-looking) set of cloth panniers across the tail of the bike frame. As shown above. (The product can be seen at this link, from Amazon.)
I bought a similar set for my wife’s BikeE. Sort of a get-out-of-rehab present. (Her bike is currently at the bike shop, for an overhaul of the 3-speed rear hub and other items.)
To hang those new cloth panniers on her bike, I need a rear rack. Which basically no longer exists, for the BikeE. Unobtainium, or close enough to it.
So I made one, like so:
This BikeE rear rack slides onto the aluminum-extrusion frame, behind the seat, to form a 6″ x 13″ shelf. Tightening the bolts clamps it firmly to the frame. (For those in-the-know, I may yet have to drill a clearance hole or two for the seat-limit rivet that’s part of the frame.)
This serves as the mount for the cloth panniers. The panniers attach to this rear rack via Velcro straps fed through the polished metal strap-eyes screwed to the corners.
To keep the panniers off the rear wheel, I wove a 48″ bungee cord (green, above) between the rear arm of the bike and the rack. This forms an elastic “V” on both sides. The panniers rest against, and Velcro to, this “V”, instead of rubbing the rear tire. In addition, the panniers themselves have a stiff back, as if from a thin sheet of plywood, which helps to keep them from the back tire.
Panniers in this position can’t stably hold as much weight as panniers mounted under the front seat. But rear-mounted panniers on this bike are adequate for (e.g.) a bag of groceries. And that’s about all I intend to use them for.
Here’s the rack, mounted and strung with a bungee. And then in final form, with the panniers installed.
Addendum: Preferred bungee routing shown below left, in torquoise. In hindsight, the bungee is more effective at keeping the panniers away from the rear wheel when it is routed as shown below. Just drill a couple of holes in the main plate to stick the metal bungee ends into, and pass the middle of the bungee around the front of the plastic rack.
(As a reminder, in the picture below, a shock absorber allows the gray swing arm and tire to move up-and-down relative to the blue frame/white rack. That’s why any connection between the two must be flexible, and is among the many reasons why a normal bike rear rack will not work in this situation.)
Details of construction: I made mine out of a 1/2″ thick piece of HDPE board, only because I had that sitting around. It’s more-or-less a half-inch thick plastic cutting board. Plywood would probably have been lighter.
The top board is 6″ x 13″, sized to match the particular panniers I bought, plus an inch of length for mounting the strap eyes to either end of the board.
Beneath that to board are two “rails”, each consisting of a “clamp” and a “spacer”. The larger piece that clamps onto the bike is 1.5″ wide, and is the full 1/2″ thickness of the material I’m using. The smaller “spacer” piece is about 3/4″ wide, and has been thinned down to about 5/16″ thickness, so that it is exactly as thick as the lip on the aluminum bike frame. To keep them together, the spacer has been screwed to the clamp piece in a couple of places.
To assemble, mark lines on the top that are 1.25″ away from the center of the bicycle. Drill them out to accept your hardware (1/4-20 bolts, in my case). Put the bolts through the top, and place that on top of the bike frame by straddling the frame with those bolts. Center the plastic top on the bike frame and clamp it down so that it can’t move.
Remove the bolts, hold one rail under the top, tight against the aluminum frame, and clamp that rail assembly to the bike rack top. Then drill down through the empty bolt holes, into the immobilized rail assembly. Run the bolts through top and rail on that side, loosely put on the nuts. Do the same for the other side.
Tighten the bolts/nuts until the bike rack is clamped firmly to the aluminum bike frame. For final assembly, it’s probably not a bad idea to use lockwashers, Locktite, doubling up the nuts, or similar, to keep the nuts from backing off the bolts.
It works, in the sense that I clamped it to my bike frame, and I couldn’t budge it. I’m sure it’ll be adequate to handle the stress of 20 pounds of groceries in the panniers.
Not shown: Cut a couple of slots in the end so you can route the bungee cord efficiently, as discussed above. Any connection between the frame and the rear swing arm has to be flexible, because the swing arm/shock move relative to the frame, as the bike goes over bumps. Hence the bungee cord.
I would put the cart before the horse, but the horse is dead.
The irony here is that about 30 minutes after I finished the above, I got an email from my local bike shop. Said email telling me that the bike is dead. My wife’s BikeE has a crack in the frame, where the suspension is attached. And because of that, my local bike shop will not do any repairs on this bike.
And yet, there has been a crack in that location for a couple of decades or so. The metal of the shock mount failed after just a few years. When BikeE wouldn’t do anything about it, I made my own repair with a piece of angle iron and a U-bolt. And continued to use the bike. This repair transmits the stress from the shock to the frame, effectively bypassing the shock mounting.
The upshot is that tomorrow, I need to clarify what the reality of the putative death of my wife’s BikeE is.
Are we talking about the failure that occurred 20 years ago, and the fix that has held up in the interim? Or is this some new failure that I did not notice, despite turning the bike every-which-way as I (e.g.) changed tires and brakes, and lubed cables?
Is the bike unsafe for use, in the opinion of the repair guy?
Or is this just a liability issue, same as you hear from car repair operations on YouTube. Simply as a matter of corporate policy, do they not work on bikes with frame damage, for fear that something will go wrong down the road, and they would be held liable.
That’s one of those questions that I’m not sure I can get a straight answer to. If the shop is afraid of the liability of working on a bike with frame damage, then they aren’t going to take on the liability of telling me the bike is OK to use. So I’m not sure it’s even worth asking.
Oddly, if I’d stuck to the original plan, none of this would have come up. At first, the plan was just to bring them the rear wheel for rebuild. (In which case, this issue would never have arisen, because they’d never see the bike frame.) I wonder if they’ll still rebuild the wheel/hub if I ask them to, as long as I take the rear wheel off the offending frame myself?
Conclusion: The second greatest waste of time in the U.S.A. …
… is doing something really well, that doesn’t need to be done at all.
In effect, I may have just made that fancy new saddle for a dead horse.
Or maybe not. If the issue is the decades-old damage, I think we’ll keep using the bike. If the issue is something new, then I’m not sure what happens next.
Addendum, the next day: It’s only temporary, unless it works. The bike mechanic did, indeed, point to the nearly-20-year-old shock mount failure as the reason the bike was un-rideable. He either missed (or dismissed) my 20-year-old expedient repair, using a U-bolt and a chunk of angle iron to transfer force from the bottom of the shock to the frame, effectively bypassing the shock mount. Near as I can tell, a U-bolt of that size should have a breaking load somewhere around a ton, and so is adequate to support a rider.
In any case, my temporary repair held up through years of riding, and nothing about it has changed. I guess I proceed by going elsewhere to get the rear hub rebuilt.
