Thanks to everyone who gave me feed back on how various bike racks worked with Rivs, fenders, racks, and wide bars. In the end we bought the 1UpUSA rack and offer this initial review
Bottom line - Rack is an A, customer service is gentlemen's C. First the rack. It is as solid and almost as easy to set up as they claim. Once learned it is pretty simple to live with and works well with my large Saluki and Pat's Betty. Pictures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25287678@N08/sets/72157655639570388 It was easy enough to get the rack onto the car, and adding or removing the second carrier is literally a one minute job. I initially ran into trouble getting it set up to work with fenders on 650B tires and had enough frustration to almost send it back. After some experimenting however I got it rock solid. The rack comes preconfigured to work with 700C tires, without fenders or a rack. I bought a pair of the fender adapters to add to the rear supports but found two problems. The rear carrier pinched, crushed actually, the fender stays before getting tight to the fender and the front attachment didn't quite get to the tire before hitting the fender. I lowered both the front and rear bars so that they would hit the wheels sooner. (you can see in the pictures how the tire stops have been lowered. This worked well in the front but continued to bend the rear fender stays. I went ahead and pushed the rear tight. This held the fender very firmly but allowed the wheel to move across the width of the two vertical wheel holders. When I released the carrier from the wheel I found that the stays immediately bounced back into position. You can see this clearly in one of the photos. I decided to simply add toe straps around the rear wheels, which held them firmly to one side. I took the rig out for a shakedown cruise which included 5 miles of dirt road, 5 miles of bad chip and seal and 5 miles of smooth highway. Pat drove while I sat in the back seat and observed the bikes. Given the amount of weight cantilevered off the back of the car and the roughness of the roads there was plenty of movement of the cars suspension but absolutely none between the bike and carrier nor the carrier and the hitch. The second bike carrier can be removed very easily and the whole rig then folds up out of the way, much better than any Tule, Yakima, or Saris rack that I have seen. So A for easy on and off and A for solidness. A for fitting two complex bikes without any interference. Service. Before ordering I sent two emails to the company seeking clarification of their shipping policy. I never got an answer. As I was working through the fender / rack / 650B set up, I called them. I told the nice lady at the other end of the line that I was having problems with the set up, and "before I send this back to you I would like to talk to someone who can speak about these issues." She promised that someone would call me but no one ever has. C for customer service. Michael -- 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 post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
