The salvage shopping bike is really coming on now. The squeaky brakes have been fixed, and this weekend I fitted the panniers. They are essential to transforming it from a silver boneshaker into a useful pedal-powered means of transporting not only people, but products.

So we rode into town and I took it to the market to get a rear rack, which mounts above the back wheel. There were two to choose from – one secured by a cuff around the seat stem, and a more traditional one that fixed both to the supports behind the saddle, and to the rear axle.

I went for the latter in the end, on the basis that it didn’t require me to raise my saddle (which is already fairly high) and that the vertical arms attaching to the axle would let it take more weight: about 25kg rather than 10kg. There’s an added bonus that I didn’t think of right away, and that is that the vertical supports also run down the side of your panniers so they don’t foul the wheels.

Now I’ll know for future reference, but I didn’t at the time, that this kind of rack comes with eight bolts, of which two are longer than the others. These are the ones that you attach to the axle, as it needs to take in the width of both the rack and the frame itself. When I discovered this (no instructions in the packaging) it required a certain amount of back-tracking as I’d already screwed them into the adjustable horizontal supports that attach below the saddle.

It took about half an hour to fit the rack and was particularly fiddly down by the gears, but it looks smart, and is level, which is a good thing. Less good was the fact that the panniers, having been built for any type of rack going, didn’t quite fit it, and so they hang a little wonky, meaning that despite those vertical supports they do rub the spokes a bit as the wheels go around. I’m going to try and fix this by lining the inner side of each one with a piece of hardboard to keep it straight.

So, the shopping bike is now pretty much a shopping bike, and the car can be left at home even more than it is already. Sometimes self-sufficiency is not only profitable; it’s also educational.

Related posts:

1. Stiffening the panniers
2. The rebuilt bike
3. Bike trailers