Almost ready for practice trips…

IMG_0024Since you left early this morning for the concert, I took that extra time to mess around with getting the racks set up on your bike.  As you can see, your tires are very reflective.  Overall, I think the racks fit your bike pretty well.  I was worried to try to rotate the front one forwards much more, as it might dig into the paint on your fork a little, but I meant to look into that more and never got back to it (in the picture you can see the front rack isn’t quite level).  At some point, I need to cut off the extra material on the extenders, but otherwise your bike is pretty much ready for panniers 🙂

IMG_0027I wasn’t planning to put the racks on mine, since I’ll be taking it back to PA this week for road riding but I’m glad I did because I realized there’s not enough space between the skewer and the braze on in front of the drop out to attach the Blackburn Outpost front rack… so I’m going to go for plan B and get an extra long skewer and mount it that way.  After noticing this, I also checked the fenders I bought and those didn’t fit either.  Anyhow, after checking the racks, I took them back off and hopefully next weekend I’ll have everything I need to get it set up for a trip the weekend of 8/22-8/24 :-).

5 thoughts on “Almost ready for practice trips…”

  1. Hi Chris!

    So did the Blackburn outpost front rack end up working or no?

    I was hoping to get one for my AWOL.

    Thanks,

    Jerald

    1. Jerald – The short answer is yes, the Outpost front rack did end up working on my AWOL. As I mentioned in the post, at first I installed it with a cut-down OMM XL Rear Skewer for mounting the lower section of the rack, rather than being bolted to the intended mount points in front of the fork dropouts. I used the rack this way for two weekend tours (150 & 200mi) last fall without any issues, but wanted to bolt it on rather than using the skewer so I wouldn’t need to partially disconnect the rack every time I removed the front tire. I ended up needing to grind small flat spots in the mounting brackets that Blackburn supplies (these allow you to adjust the height) with the rack, which gave me the little extra space I needed between the skewer nut and the bracket. Those brackets come with a flat spot in them already, but it wasn’t at the right location.

      My first thought was that the position of the rack mount points were different than most other bikes, with regard to the location of the skewer when fully seated in the dropout. However, I spoke with someone at a bike shop who also has an Outpost front rack on an AWOL. They didn’t need to grind the brackets at all to make it work, so I am wondering if the brackets that came with my rack might have been built incorrectly. Either way it will work, but hopefully you won’t need to add the flat spots in the height-adjustment brackets like I did, although it was very easily done since they are made of aluminum. Sorry for the lengthy response, hope it helps though!

      1. Thank you so much for the response! I’m glad to hear that the rack will work (even if a little modification is necessary). I’ll go ahead and pull the trigger on the blackburn. I tried the Jandd front rack and that didn’t work at all, needless to say I’m ready to be done with it and do some touring!

        Thank you!

  2. Woohoo at least we match for one thing (racks)! They look pretty cool. Your bike is so stealthy and ninja-like.

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