This is the easiest-to-install and most rigid rear rack, designed by Rivendell. It sets up perfectly on bikes with normal or loooong chainstays, like on their current frames. The rack sits level, tucks in close for use as a saddlebag support when it's not carrying panniers, and is easy to slide back far if you're a big-footed fella riding a bike with tragically short chainstays and trying to get heel clearance with panniers.
It's tubular stainless steel, TIG-welded by experts in Taiwan. It's shiny when new, maybe time will mellow it, we just don't know. It shouldn't rust, anyway.
Like all good racks, it's triangulated at the stress joints to isolate the main welds from stress. It is hard to imagine the kind of alien forces that would break this rack. If yours breaks in normal use, we simply won't believe you...sorry.
It weighs a bit under two pounds, middle-of-the-road for rear racks.
It comes with a variety of M5 bolts and washers that'll do the trick on most bikes out there. If you have one of Riv's bikes with the beefier M6 braze-ons, holler and we'll work it out.
The only DIY part that's even halfway tricky is bending the sliding stays to mate up with the seat stay braze-ons, and sometimes to lift the rack up high enough to clear a 29 x 2.4-inch tire. The stays are bendable by hand and we suggest finding a household mandrel that matches the angle you need. Riv used a Kleen Kanteen in the picture, but it could be a kettlebell, tuna can, or a Kickapoo coffee can. There's something in every house that'll work. Bolt the struts together first for an even bend on both.
And you have to slightly spread the rack (pre-tension it) to make it fit on the outside of the lower eyelets. It's easy, you'll get it.
