Thule Pack 'n Pedal Tour Rack

Instead of bolting to eyelets on the frame or fork, Thule's Pack 'n Pedal Tour rack mounts on your bike with ratchet straps. That makes it one of very few options if you want to carry bags on a frame with no rack mounts, and while it works well, it's a bit heavy and expensive.

The Thule Pack 'n Pedal Tour rack will fit pretty much any bike - racer, 26er, 29er, whateverer - and is fairly easy to swap between them whenever the fancy takes you.

Thule are better known for roof racks, and in the bike world for their roof-, towball- and hatch-mounted bike carriers. They bought the design for the Pack 'n Pedal rack from New Zealand product design company Freeload and have developed a range of panniers around it, some of which we'll be reviewing over the next few weeks.

The rack is made from aluminium and glass-fiber reinforced polypropylene, assembled with stainless steel bolts. It comes with a selection of struts that should allow it to attach to virtually any bike. We used the shorter struts for a fairly standard road bike, and the medium-length ones to get the rack level on a smaller hybrid.

The very longest struts will likely work for the very low stays on some suspension mountain bikes, but we didn't try that. We'd be surprised if you can find a standard double diamond frame the Tour rack won't fit, though you might run into trouble if you're running tyres fatter than 2.5 inches wide. As this is a website mostly about road bikes, that shouldn't be a problem for most of you.

The ratchet strap attachment system works well - much better than you'd expect from looking at it. It really does provide a platform stable enough to hang up to 18kg of luggage off (25kg if you strap it on top).

To fit the rack, you thread each of the four straps through the mechanism and then tighten it up with the supplied 5mm ball-end Allen key. Thule also supplies a security release key to loosen the rack, so a passing low-life can't steal the rack. The key has an offset pin to release the ratchet mechanism, and as far as we can tell it's unique to the Pack 'n Pedal rack, so keep in somewhere safe.

The main selling point of this rack is its versatility and the only situation we found where it ran into trouble was fitting bikes with cables down the seat-stays like some cyclo-cross bikes. If that's your bike, try before you buy to make sure the cables and straps don't do battle.

The rack works best with Thule's own range of panniers. It is possible to use other panniers, but you might run into problems with the fatness of the tubes (Ortlieb), or the solid plastic platform that gets in the way of the hook release (Carradice). Thule sells a pair of side frames that allow you to use 'virtually any type of pannier' and that also have a second rail so you can mount the panniers nearer the ground for a lower center of gravity.

These will cost you another £25 on top of the £85 you've paid for the rack (£22.49 and £76.95 if you shop around). That's the same retail price as the stainless steel Tubus Cosmo. The Cosmo weighs 730g, against the 1420g of the Tour rack with side frames, and will carry twice as much. Tubus offer adapters to coax a rack on to a frame without eyelets too, though Thule's way of doing things is undeniably more elegant.

If you haven't got braze-ons, or your bike has some other awkwardness that makes fitting a regular rear rack difficult or impossible, the Thule Pack 'n Pedal Tour rack is a great way to carry luggage. It's well-made, the design is clever and it's surprisingly solid on the bike.

Having said that, it might be worth thinking about why your frame doesn't have braze-ons: it might not be designed to carry loads, and you might run into issues around stability under load and heel clearance. If you do have braze-ons, the Thule rack is still a viable option, but most regular four-bolt racks will be cheaper, weigh less and will be more stable.

Verdict

It's a good solution for running a rack on a bike without braze-ons, though it's expensive and heavy.