Originally Posted by
cyccommute
Your bike does have rack mounts. The red arrow point to the mounting points. The first post in this ****** thread shows your bike with a rack mounted, although it has linear brakes.
Those do look like mount points, but even if they weren't there there are other possibilities for regular rack nounting. Tubus and axiom both have options for lower mounting without bosses. Likely there are others. You'd have to look what models suited your bike and needs.
Top mount pounts can be improvised if they are not specifically provided. Brake bridge hole, canti brake bosses, seat clamps with a mount bolt, and p-clamps are all possible options where there are no specifc upper rack mount bosses, but again it looks like your bike accomodates with regular mount points.
Your rack most certainly doesn’t have a 50 kg capacity. That’s probably a mistranslation or misprint. Tubus racks…about the strongest you can get…have a capacity of 40 kg. And it is much stronger than a seatpost type rack. 50 lb is more likely the maximum capacity that rack can handle. Similar racks I’ve seen have a 50 lb or 22kg capacity.
Or an outright lie by the seller. Some of these ratings are crazy.
Perhaps but moving the load forwards will probably result in heel strikes. The Trek 4300 has very short chainstays as do most mountain bikes of that era. It makes them work better as mountain bikes.
Yeah, that can depend on how far you move it, your shoe size, pannier size, pannier shape, how high the pannier is mounted, and foot placemant on the pedal. I have generall managed with shortish stays and largish feet, but I didn't use huge panniers and when I was carrying a lot (before I started trimming my loadt) I did need to tweak things a little to get it all just right. I'd have had a bit of heel strike if the panniers were as far forward as they would go with the heavy touring setup I started out with.