Adding Capacity to my Dawes Horizon

Jun 092012

Having added a CoPilot Taxi to my bike, I cannot use the rear racks for carrying a pannier with coat/tools/snack/etc, and I hate riding with a rucksack, so the obvious solution was to add some front panniers, after all, I do have braze on mounts on my Dawes Horizon (its a 2003 or 2004 model)

Finding some panniers was not so easy. The halfords ones looked like a solution, but did not look like they would work once I bought them, still it was only £14.99… Having spent far too long using Google, I came across the Tortec Expedition Front Rack which I then bought from www.cyclexpress.co.uk.

Now comes excitement. Can I actually fit it to my bike? it turns out that I can, but i had to ignore the instructions a little bit.

The instructions say to use the mudguard mount, but that would not work for locating onto the braze on, so I used the other threaded hole (which I imagine is there for this purpose) although it had to be packed with some spacers. For this I used some washers I happened to have lying around, this let me use the 15mm M4 screws that came screwed into the clamp mounts (the mounts for use on forks without braze on mounts as shown in the image below.

Then I just need to affix it to the braze on mounts. Here is where this rack is very clever, there is a mounting that can be rotated, and comes with several different screw holes. this gives a good amount of flexibility in the mounting point, and allows getting the rack pretty much mounted level. See the below image