Here's a few pictures of a friends bike that I built a heavy duty front rack for. Not too sure on the year but I'm guessing late 70's early eighties. I helped him purchase the bike from a local shop here in Seattle that sells a lot of used bicycles and components. It was in great shape and is a fine example of what I wish were more available new from bike shops these days.

Scott is a rider who is hard on his bicycle and he also needs to carry fairly heavy loads from time to time so when it came to the design of his rack I didn't want to mess around. It's somewhat over engineered but I didn't want it to break.

The rack deck support struts are 7/16" x 0.035" chrome moly. steel. The deck itself is made from 3/8" x 0.028" cro-mo, bent up using an inexpensive bender from Aircraft Spruce. All the joints are oxy-acetylene brazed with brass rod. The rack mounting points at the lower part of each fork leg are the threaded parts of cantilever studs, brazed on with a generous fillet of brass.

The classy and sublte paint job is courtesy of a can of Rustoleum.

Scott reports that he really likes the rack and used it on a daily basis. It probably would have been more optimal to increase the fork rake thus lowering the trail was the case for many of the porteurs of old (see Jan Heine's articles in VBQ) but we decided against that. Scott's a good bike handler and a strong rider and seems to have no problem with manoeuvring the bike.

I tried to document this build with pictures but found it hard to do. Constantly stopping to take photo's disrupted my work flow. I suspect this may improve as I get more experienced with building this kind of thing. I hope you can use some of my pictures.

Thanks for the site.

Alistair, in Seattle.

alspence67@hotmail.com