This Space for Rent

Amusing discovery of the week

I’d bought a used Nitto M-12 rack for cheap a few months ago as a form for building handlebar bags, but eventually thought it would be more useful if I could put it onto a bicycle and use it for test-riding finished bags. The problem was that the reason why it was cheap was because the fork crown bolt had snapped off leaving only the two canti post mounts to hold it on.

This is not a problem. It would be simple to cut the end of the remaining fork crown mount off and braze a metric bolt onto the stub instead of the no-doubt custom piece that Nitto used. So I clamped it in a vise and hacksawed the end off, onto to discover a cross-shaped recess in the middle of the section I cut off. It turns out, apparently, that Nitto made the same discovery I did (but probably 20 years, if not more, earlier) in that a regular old steel M6 bolt makes an ideal custom bolt piece.

And it was brazed, not welded, on.

So all I need to do is take a little bit of chrome off the stub, jig and flux it (as well as another bolt), then braze everything together to make a rando rack that’s virtually indistinguishable (except for the teeny detail that my brazing skills are, ahem, not quite as good as Nitto’s staff) from the original.

And then I’ll get it powder coated, eventually, when I powdercoat the rest of the collection of racks I’ve made up.