RSS FeedsTubus Logo Rear Pannier Rack Review
by Tom on the 31st of January 2008
The German manufacturer Tubus’ range of racks might occupy the upper end of the pricing scale, but for good reason - the racks are immensely strong. The Logo is designed for mountain-bike geometry, offering increased heel clearance for the panniers. With a tubular steel construction, the rack is not only rigid and durable, but is easily fixed by a local welder in case of a breakage. That said, we have not encountered any problems so far, and the racks carry a 10 year guarantee.
The rack is powder-coated but Tubus also supply a number of protective patches that you can apply at points where an interface occurs between the tubing and your panniers. This prevents the coating from being worn and the metal exposed to the elements, where rust might occur. We recommend that you check where rubbing occurs and apply these patches as soon as possible. The most common areas are likely to be at the points where the pannier attaches to the rack (depending on your pannier system), and on the lower tubing where the bags will be resting against the sides of the rack. If you run out of patches or they wear out, the all-conquering Gaffa tape will suffice.
Tubus also supply a range of accessories to let you mount the rack on practically any frame you’d ever want to take on a tour, even if it lacks the standard bolt-holes and rack-mounts. The rack can interface with an optional axle-mounting kit for the rear wheel’s axle, which makes use of a special skewer replacing the standard skewer. Unfortunately, we found that this was not compatible with the Extrawheel’s special skewer, but our frames do indeed have the necessary bolt-holes above the drop-outs to make direct frame attachment possible.
Tubus also make a range of clamps for the seat-stay attachment, with a number of options to suit the seat-stay diameter of your frame. These are easy to fit, being little more than thin steel strips that wrap around the seat-stays and which are bolted together on the rear side, with the rack-stays also bolted through a second set of bolt-holes. The system is simple and it works very well - in fact, with bolting being generally stronger than welding, it should actually be more secure than using brazed-on rack-mounts. We applied a protective layer of Gaffa tape to the frame before mounting the clamps, to avoid paint damage and corrosion.
We’ve used the rack successfully with both Carradice Super C panniers and Crosso Dry panniers, and of course it’s likely to take pretty much any pannier you might lay your hands on. We have on occasion had the need to load the rack with a huge amount of weight - 750km was cycled through Bulgaria and Turkey with Andy’s entire repertoire of luggage and a spare wheel strapped to the Tubus Logo (including the entire contents of the trailer), and it didn’t complain.
In conclusion, you’d be well advised to choose the strongest steel rack you can go for, and the Tubus Logo fits the bill. It is especially suitable if you are planning on using a mountain-bike frame, where heel clearance and the availability of rack-mounting points may be an issue. Tubus also make a number of similar steel racks that may be more suited to the geometry of other types of frame.
(Note: We have also had some experience trying to fit the Tubus Swing front rack, which is designed for use with suspension forks. The design looks good on paper, as it suspends the panniers from the fork crown and steerer tube, so that the suspension also dampens impacts upon the rack and luggage itself. This would probably alleviate the all-too-common problem of a breakage in the front rack as a result of repeated impacts. Unfortunately, we found that the crown of the Magura Odur fork was too wide to accommodate the clamp system that is required to fit the rack, so we had to abandon the idea of fitting the rack at all. We expect that most modern forks would encounter similar problems, as the clamp is really designed to accommodate skinnier, shorter forks of the type that were common 5 or so years ago. You might still find some suitable forks that are compatible with the rack, but modern fork technology and design seems to have advanced incredibly quickly and has for the most part left the Tubus Swing’s mounting system in its wake.)
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