Review: Tubus Fly Rear Rack

This is the first installment in a review of the tubus fly rack.

I sold my dedicated commuter and plan on riding my various other bikes to work. Seems I mostly ride my single speed specialized tricross, mostly because it is the one I keep in my garage…

One of the reasons I sold my dedicated commuter was that I began to hate riding it.

What you say? Yes I hated riding it, I have been “forced” to ride that bike to work everyday for 3 years now. It weighed a ton, and I don’t know… I just got tired of it. I can bring a bike in my office now so why not ride a nicer bike?

I decided I wanted to take a slightly different approach on adding a rack to my tricross. I figure I am not touring on this bike. Only commuting to work and the grocery store. No need to make a heavy tank. So with that in mind I opted for the Tubus Fly rear rack. I purchased it from Wayne @ TheTouringStore.com .
First thing you notice is how light it is. Good lord this thing weighs nothing, 11 oz. The very nice Jandd standard rack on my old castro valley weighed in at 28.8 oz..

It came with all of the hardware required to mount it:
The singlecross has 120mm rear spacing, which made/let met use the two black vinyl spacers to keep the rack at the right spacing and probably eliminate some noise.
The fly mounts with only one tube at the brake. I tried it out without any bending.
Clearly this wasn’t going to work. Props again to Wayne at theTouringStore.com for printing out and including the installation instructions with the rack.
Err uh.. I didn’t really know what to do here, so I bent the metal tab on the brake arch to a nice looking angle.

Then I made sure the rack was level.At this point it was time to figure out how much bending would be needed to get the black tube to meet the silver tab.
A few bends in a vice got the angle right. I wrapped the tube in an old tube to keep from gouging the metal.

With the tube bent correctly I attached it to the metal tab with a nut and bolt. Oddly enough it did not include these parts.
With that part tightened up, I tightened the small set screw on the rack. The rack even came with what I assume are stickers to protect the rack from wear caused by the bag mounts.
The rack has really thick rails, so I had to swap out to the largest spacers on the ortlieb bag.And here you see the stickers in place.
Looking at how small the rack was I was very skeptical I would have adequate heel clearance. But with the bag on, no problems.

I woke up early today and got in a nice long ride in Frick and Schenely parks on the way to work. I didn’t use a pannier today, I used my EVO Waterproof backpack. But that was part of the reason I purchased this rack. I didn’t want to notice any extra weight on the bike. And I couldn’t tell that I had any extra weight on the bike.