Originally Posted by
Prowler
Well done. I like this idea too and have bar suspended supports on two bikes. One for my Cannondale bag and one for the Eclipse.
I made a bottom support style like yours for another bag but used steel rod (cuz that's what I had) with an oak rod across the ends to stiffen it. It's fine for light day rides but worrisome for heavy loads. When I heavy loaded that bag for my trip on the GAP, I made a loop stay to attach to the fork eyes and secure to the bottom of that under support. It helped transfer weight to the axle and prevented any bag bouncing on the GAPs various surfaces. A versatile set now.
I wish I could fab as well as that guy you know. Nice work.
Andy gives me a bit more credit than I deserve. I've got plenty of tubing stock for rack making, so we used a stick of thinwall 1/4" stainless steel tubing. Bends were made using my
$8.95 Harbor Freight tubing bender, which despite abusing it for over 5 years, it's still going strong. The first bend was easy, 180 degree in the middle of the tube. It was ne'er impossible to use the tubing bender for the 2nd bends, however, so we did it "in situ", which is corporate speak for "on the bike." As we were trying to do that, the bend in the tubing slid back on the stem every time we tried to wrap it around the handlebars. Andy came up with the idea to put a C-clamp behind the bend so it wouldn't slip. Once that was done, the rest of the bends were straight forward using the tubing bender. One note, we started with a 6' stick of tubing and used less than 4' of it if anyone is planning on trying this themselves.
Here's the McMaster part number for the tubing if you don't have another source, 6' section goes for about $18.
It took us maybe 30 minutes to make this. A couple of steps required two people, more clever people could probably figure out how to do it themselves.
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Prowler, you are correct, this thing really isn't intended to hold a heavy load, but it does a good job of it's intended use of holding the bottom of a lightly loaded bag from sagging and rubbing on the front wheel.