This Space for Rent

More racks

trois porte-bagage

A rack for a Velo Orange Pass Hunter Disc, the rack that’s going onto the Pelican with the fork I modified yesterday, and the prototype for the Velo Orange rack.

The Velo Orange rack looks like it does because it’s a redo; It’s part of a 5-rack order that I finished last month without first verifying the (if not for being a disc) brake bolt to fork leg mountpoint distances. Since I’d made a PH-D rack this spring, I was certain that the brake bolt to leg mount distance was 125mm (spoiler: it’s not), and I didn’t listen to the little voice screaming in my head (“VERIFY BEFORE BRAZING! VERIFY BEFORE BRAZING!”) and went ahead and brazed everything together before needing some reassurance.

I didn’t get that reassurance, so I had to redo that rack. Siiiiigh. But at least if I’m going to redo it I’ll make the customer happy by making the rack a little fancier, and what I did for that was to extend the center of the rack back a little bit so the tombstone can be offset from the perimeter and the bag can be supported by the perimeter on all 4 sides. And I did it twice because I wanted to see if my process worked. Which it does; it’s actually faster to make this kind of rack because the interior rails only need to be fitted once instead of piece-by-piece. I’m not sure if I like it better than my standard metal rectangle, but if it’s always going to have a rando bag plopped down on top of it all you’ll see is the rear of the extension sticking out under the tombstone.

(And, yes, it’s a bit crooked as is traditional; I’ve already patched that by the simple expedient of cutting the offending side of the perimeter and inserting an internal lug & tubing spacer to square the short edge.)