After riding my Surly Long Haul Trucker for several years, I finally decided to outfit the bike with a front rack. Luckily, the LHT is designed as a touring bike, with two eyelets on each dropout, so fitting a rack doesn’t require Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson?) improvisations. I weighed the merits of a number of competing designs, but I settled on an inexpensive alloy rack made by Bor Yueh, the same folks who made my LHT’s rear rack. It’s an old-fashioned platform-type front carrier, not a low-rider. If you’ve never heard of Bor Yueh, I’m not surprised. They don’t make “trophy racks.” Their products are simple and cheap. Many cyclists find this combination somewhat off-putting. Not me, though. Bor Yueh racks work. This more than makes up for the total absence of “polished stainless steel” and the lack of a nearly three-figure price tag. My Bor Yueh rear rack is in its third year. Or is it its fourth? After thousands of miles and thousands of pounds—that’s the total weight of cargo hauled, of course; the heaviest single load I’ve carried on it was around 55 pounds—it’s still going strong. And did I mention that it was cheap? It was.

So I expect great things from my new front rack. I won’t be carrying 55-pound loads there, however. Just a sleeping pad. Or a pair of small Delta panniers. (These are also cheap. And good.) Or maybe I’ll use the rack to support my ‘bar bag. (I’d love to get the bag’s bracket off my bars!) Plus I can put a headlight where it will do the most good: out front and up high, but not too high.

First, though, I had to mount the thing. It didn’t take long. Just two leisurely hours. I did the job in my living room on a rainy morning. The trickiest bit involved routing the bracket around my front brake’s straddle cable and getting the bend just right, so that the rack platform ended up nice and level. Here’s what the job entailed:

• • Fasten rack supports loosely to dropout eyelets
• • Loosen fender hanger bolt
• • Unship front brake’s straddle cable
• • Shape rack’s support bracket in vise
• • Bolt bracket and fender hanger to fork crown
• • Bolt bracket to rack
• • Tighten all fasteners
• • Fine-tune straddle and brake cables
• • Test brakes

And here’s the assembly sequence in pictures, beginning with the naked rack:

In fastening the rack supports to the dropout eyelets, I used bolts that were long enough to allow me to fit neoprene gaskets (faucet washers, actually) between support and eyelet. I wanted to engage all the threads in the eyelet without extending further, and a little trial and error gave me exactly the length I needed.

The gaskets will protect the paintwork while preventing squeaking. In order that I could pivot the rack forward to rest on the floor, I left the bolts loose while I worked on the bracket:

Now came the Tricky Bit: snaking the bracket through the gap between straddle cable and fender. (That’s a square of old inner tube under the head of the bolt at the fork crown. It’s there to protect the paint.)

Here’s what’s on the other end of the bolt (a piece of electrical tape on the forward face of the fender hanger keeps it from scratching the fork):

I launched my attack on the Tricky Bit by removing the bolt and letting the fender sag down, supported only by the stays. Then I loosened the brake’s straddle cable. Job One was now forming the bracket, an L-shaped length of slotted, chromed steel, with a hole drilled in the shorter end to receive the bolt at the fork crown.

I needed to make two additional bends, changing the L to a sort of lazy-S. But I also had to tidy up the original bend, which wasn’t quite a right angle. I began by holding the bracket in place and marking the locations of the new bends with a felt-tipped pen. Then I clamped the bracket in the jaws of my vise—suitably padded, of course, to avoid marring the chrome finish—and started to work it into shape. I proceeded cautiously, removing the bracket from the vise and checking the bends frequently, using only the flat of my hand to form the desired angles. At long last, when everything looked good, I bolted the bracket to the fork crown, reattaching the fender hanger at the same time:

Once that was done, I secured the rack to the bracket using the cap screws and Nylock nuts provided. Only when I was satisfied that everything was as it should be…

…did I screw everything down tight. Here’s how the bracket looked then:

Finally, I lengthened the straddle cable slightly to allow it to clear the bracket…

…before taking up the newly introduced slack at the cable adjuster and road-testing the brakes. Nothing remained for me to do but fashion a shock mounting for a headlight. Here are a couple of shots of the completed job:

Now all I need to do is clip on my panniers and hit the road!

By the way, if you’ve been swayed by my words and gone in search of a Bor Yueh front rack to call your own, you’re in for a frustrating time. The last time I looked—I wanted a second rack for another bike—I couldn’t find one anywhere. Good product + Low price = No Sale. Go figure.

 
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