FYI: Fitting a Tubus Tara to a Miyata 615gt
06-11-21, 08:03 AM
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FYI: Fitting a Tubus Tara to a Miyata 615gt
In case anybody else decides to try this for themselves, I thought I'd provide my own experience here. With pictures!
The final angle is great, or "optimal" in the words of the very terse Tubus installation instructions. The top bar is almost perfectly level with the ground when installed using the uppermost mounting hole on the fender eyelet of the fork, exactly as pictured in the instructions.
As the OLN distance on my bike is something like 110mm, the provided spacers had to be used. I believe that the mid-fork width is still technically out-of-range even with the spacers, so the top bars had to be "coaxed" into place and so are slightly angled inward.
As for those mid-fork mounting holes! I discovered that they were too large for M5 bolts and assumed that they must be M6. But then I found that M5 bolts slide all the way through the mid-fork mounting holes easily. So I went to the hardware store and after a lot of time digging through drawers of bolts came home with: 40mm M5 bolts, various M6 bolts and a file, and some Loctite blue. I wanted to cover all the bases.
It turns out that the mid-fork mounting holes do NOT fit M6 (good thing I didn't file out the Tara before checking...) Upon closer inspection, it looks like maybe there aren't actually threads at all inside the Miyata's mid-fork mounting points. In any case, M5 passes through them and I had calculated ahead of time that I would need 40mm in order to accommodate the spacer, washers, and a nylock nut.
And of course, since I had to re-mount the fenders to the holes provided by the Tara, my fender line was messed up. Realigning it caused the sharp ends of the stays to jut out menacingly. I am loathe to trim them further as I plan to possibly remove the Tara when I am not planning on touring. However, the Tara is so light (all things considered) that it might make more sense to just leave them on, especially considering that nylock nuts are single-use -- something which the installation instructions alerted me to and which I did not know.
Anyway, that's everything worth mentioning about this project. Perhaps anybody else has had experience with these Miyata 615/1000 mid-fork mounting points? Did I miss something about these? Do they fit M6 with a different pitch than I tried? Or were they always designed with a compression fitting in mind? Am I at risk of the whole thing exploding under load because of the slightly angled in parts?
The final angle is great, or "optimal" in the words of the very terse Tubus installation instructions. The top bar is almost perfectly level with the ground when installed using the uppermost mounting hole on the fender eyelet of the fork, exactly as pictured in the instructions.
As the OLN distance on my bike is something like 110mm, the provided spacers had to be used. I believe that the mid-fork width is still technically out-of-range even with the spacers, so the top bars had to be "coaxed" into place and so are slightly angled inward.
As for those mid-fork mounting holes! I discovered that they were too large for M5 bolts and assumed that they must be M6. But then I found that M5 bolts slide all the way through the mid-fork mounting holes easily. So I went to the hardware store and after a lot of time digging through drawers of bolts came home with: 40mm M5 bolts, various M6 bolts and a file, and some Loctite blue. I wanted to cover all the bases.
It turns out that the mid-fork mounting holes do NOT fit M6 (good thing I didn't file out the Tara before checking...) Upon closer inspection, it looks like maybe there aren't actually threads at all inside the Miyata's mid-fork mounting points. In any case, M5 passes through them and I had calculated ahead of time that I would need 40mm in order to accommodate the spacer, washers, and a nylock nut.
And of course, since I had to re-mount the fenders to the holes provided by the Tara, my fender line was messed up. Realigning it caused the sharp ends of the stays to jut out menacingly. I am loathe to trim them further as I plan to possibly remove the Tara when I am not planning on touring. However, the Tara is so light (all things considered) that it might make more sense to just leave them on, especially considering that nylock nuts are single-use -- something which the installation instructions alerted me to and which I did not know.
Anyway, that's everything worth mentioning about this project. Perhaps anybody else has had experience with these Miyata 615/1000 mid-fork mounting points? Did I miss something about these? Do they fit M6 with a different pitch than I tried? Or were they always designed with a compression fitting in mind? Am I at risk of the whole thing exploding under load because of the slightly angled in parts?
Last edited by zygomorph; 06-11-21 at 08:07 AM.
