Bike & Jeep

Considering I’ve been hit in the rear by other vehicles on 5 occasions over the years, the idea of carrying my bike on the rear of my vehicle is not something I’m too interested in. So about 3 years ago I started carrying my bike on the front of my Jeep using a hitch rack I made. It works good and has done a fine job. I never tailgate people and I’d consider myself a safe driver, so I feel that the bike is fairly safe from a collision… but there is always things that are unavoidable.

The unavoidable just about happened a month ago. I had the Wife’s Padrino on the front of my Jeep. We where going down a the road and a deer ran right out in front of us. I swerved and the deer ran like hell and somehow we where able to get around each other with out colliding. It was so close that when I got home our dog started sniffing the left side of my bumper… she could smell the deer on it. There’s been a lot of deer hit by vehicles on this same stretch of road lately… about 2 hit each week. And considering that I have to drive this road every time I leave home, I decided to start carrying my bike on the roof rack for awhile, until I didn’t see deer laying by the road side.

Bad mistake, within the week I had driven one of my bikes right into the garage while pulling in. So in the end, it was my own efforts to keep my bike safe that actually ruined it. Go figure.

So, the rear was out of the question, the roof turned out to be a costly mistake and the front was the only choice for now. But there was one more option that I had seen before that I thought may be the right solution for my bike rack. I had seen a photo of another guy’s Jeep rack about a year earlier and thought it may be something I should look in to. So I dug through a folder on my hard drive to find the pictures of this guy’s Jeep rack and found them, spent about a week searching for a Jeep Swing Away Tire Carrier like his and that would work with a bike rack installed and I finally found one that fit the bill. The swing away tire carrier this guy is using is way out of my budget. So I decided to get a “Dirt Worx” Jeep bumper swing away tire carrier. The price was right, the features are a perfect fit for what I’m trying to achieve and it looked stout enough to take the kind of abuse I’ll be throwing at it. So I bought one and took it to Drake Powder Coating to get it covered in a Flux black powder coat. I got the bumper/swing back from Drake just this week. Drake did a fine job with the powder coating. They paint bike frames too if anyone is interested.

Today I decided to skip my Saturday ride so I could get my bumper/swing installed. It took a few hours, but was not too difficult. I’m really impressed with how stout it is. The Dirt Worx bumper/swing is solid and I’m very pleased with the results. I still need to figure out the rack assembly for the bike and how I’ll be mounting it to my bumper swing away tire carrier. I’ll probably go the same route that this guy did for his Jeep, but I would like to get the rear bike tire down lower so I can completely clear the garage when entering and exiting. I tested my rack today using a Yakima rack just to see if I could clear the garage, but the bike’s saddle was a few inches too high. I could always drop my saddle and this would let me in and out of the garage with no problem. But I’d prefer not to mess with the saddle, because I like where it is positioned and never care much for quick release seat post collars.

So I think I’ll be doing a little welding tomorrow and fab a bike rack of my own out of 1.5″ metal tubing. I plan to let it run across the top of the swing away tire carrier as seen in the guy’s Jeep photos. But for the rear wheel, I’ll cut the 1.5″ tubing and bend it down on the rear wheel side and weld it back together. This should drop the saddle height just enough to clear the garage with room to spare. I may do the same for the fork side too. I think this is going to be the perfect solution for carrying my bike and will free up the front Jeep hitch for carrying other things, which will be nice. Once I get it finished I’ll post some photos of the results.