Couple of tips for traveling with bikes on racks: 1) Wrap the upper and lower headset bearings with something like Saran Wrap. This keeps the grease from being blown out of the headset while traveling at highway speeds.
2) After you've mounted the bikes on the rack where you want them, move 'em back and forth to see how they interact with each other. Where there is contact, insulate those areas with something like the soft foam stuff you find in packages of fruit, etc. Then use some string - cheap stuff like binder twine (this should be familiar to someone who grew up on a farm) that you can discard - to hold them in place. 3) Never mind how wonderful the maker of a saddle cover says his product is, put something like a thin plastic grocery sack (making sure it has no holes!) over the saddle first, then the cover. It may not look so great that way, but it'll go a long way to better ensure that your saddles will arrive dry. 4) You may need some bungie cords of different lengths to lash the bikes together to keep things from moving. The front wheels, for example, like to flop back and forth at highway speeds, wreaking all sorts of havoc. Sorry about the damage. We wish you would have asked us first :-( On Monday, July 13, 2020 at 4:08:50 PM UTC-5, Bicycle Belle Ding Ding! wrote: > > Every year I point the van north and drive from Vegas to small town North > Dakota, and the lakes country of Minnesota. And every year I drag 3-4 bikes > along with us on a Saris rack. I’ve gone through several different bikes in > the past several years (the kids are growing, I switched to That Clem Life, > etc) so I’ve never found an exact formula to make the bikes fit perfectly. > This year I hauled my new loooonnnnngggg 52 cm Clementine (2019 geo), the > old 1st gen 52 cm blue Clem H, #theClemRider’s little 45 cm 2018 Clem H, > and Baby Bear’s 24 inch Specialized Hot Rock. > > I never regret bringing my bikes, but I do admit I lament that they come > back to Vegas in poorer condition than when they left. We always get caught > in a rainstorm at some point, and usually more than once. After that I > always notice creaking where there hadn’t been, rust on the heads of bolts > or inside the braze-ons. I usually have new scuffs from the bikes knocking > together on the rack, dirt and grit where I hadn’t had it before. One year > I drove to a shooting range on 20 miles’ worth of gravel roads and the > bikes were completely trashed at a level you can’t fathom. The Betty Foy > (now sold) had a permanent ugly mark on the top tube where the arm bar of > the rack had mashed the cable into the paint. > > You would think I would learn and get this dialed in but I never really > do. This year was really something - when was the last time you tried to > get 3 Rivendells with Bosco bars on a rack? Boscos don’t play nicely. Three > of 4 of the bikes had baskets, and all 4 had racks. Yeah, nightmare. > > So, this vacation I have discovered new ways to damage my bikes. I’ll > provide the photos and explanations in the next post... > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/476459e4-9d7e-499d-9ae5-8e9d311d2d12o%40googlegroups.com.
