WTF-J

It was time to add a bike rack to the Jeep formerly known as WTF-J.  This part of the State has great bike trails running along the rivers that tie into the Ohio River, unfortunately getting to these trails would consume most of the time and energy available for the ride, the answer, albeit with adverse carbon footprint implications is to haul the bikes to the head of the trail.  While it would be easy enough to throw our bikes in the back of the pickup, the better idea is rooted in the notion that if it’s nice enough to ride a bike it’s nice enough to drive the Jeep formerly known as WTF-J to get to the trail.

When the girls were younger and we lived in Michigan, we landed on multi-purpose sport racks to haul bikes up to Mackinac Island in the summer and skis in the winter.  The first rack (c. 1990) was a real inexpensive Bic (Yes, the same Bic that got famous with ballpoint pens!) that was OK for skis but a bit flimsy for bikes.  With the Bic rack it always seemed like we were one curve or one stop away from dumping everything.  Version 2.0 (c. 1993) was a slick Yakima cross-bar and track system that tied into the luggage rack on the ZJ we had at the time. 

The ZJ is long gone, but the rack endured.  Even though the Yakima rack was very stable and relatively easy to load/unload, getting the bikes on/off the roof of an SUV without scratching paint or getting “painted” with grease, mud, and on the return trips from Mackinac Island, horseshit was a challenge.  Having spent all of the time/effort to convert the coil spring suspension to the Airock system suggested that the Jeep formerly known as WTF-J was already too tall and the last thing it needed was an additional 3-4 feet of height.

I played around with Visio and came up with a plan for using the tracks from the Yakima rack to work as a receiver hitch style rack.

The heavy gauge steel frame was overkill, but it used leftover material from the trailer build.  In this picture you can see the raw steel from the first “test fitting.”  Plan “A” was to have the bikes facing opposite directions to balance the load and minimize the rear overhang, but it turned out that the handlebars actually fit tighter when the bikes were facing the same direction.  Plan “B” had the bikes facing the other direction, but having a rear “facing” kickstand is a real advantage during the loading/unloading process.

More overkill with the gussets on the cross as they are 1/4” steel, but it was the only flat strip scrap I had left in the pile.

  As this was a custom part, I could “nest” the bikes tightly and trim the length of the tail piece to minimize the rear overhang.  During the test fitting process the rear projection was cut by ~6” from the paper plan. 

In the base of the receiver you can see the locking pin.  That hole was a critical dimension as the goal is to have a tight fit to minimize slop in the connection and the corresponding noise.

Once the dimensions were set and the frame was welded, time for paint.  In this picture you can see the critical alignment of the holes for the two tracks.  Yakima slides the heads of carriage bolts through the T-slots in the bottom of their extruded aluminum tracks to secure them to the rack frame.  A lot of the techniques for precision drilling learned (the hard way) in fabbing the trailer came in handy here!

In this picture you can see the rack completely assembled.   You also get a preview of the polished out tub.  A couple of days with a buffing wheel and some compound really made a difference on the body.  (More to come!)

To test the rack, we loaded the bikes and headed off to Milford (~20 min drive) and biked over to Loveland for lunch. (~18 mi round trip.)   Other than the suspension’s active compensation seeming a bit busier than normal, you’d hardly know they were back there. 

Considering that the Yakima parts are ~15 yrs old, it looks pretty good.  (The only parts purchased in this project were 10 stainless carriage bolts, as even the paint was a leftover.)