E-Bike Too Heavy for Your Rack? Here's What We Did

This is my RadRover 6 Plus e-bike and this is a great bike but it has one problem. It's really heavy. This bike weighs close to 80 pounds so transporting it is an issue. It's not something that I can lift up put on most racks or even in the back of my truck because it's just heavy and the size of it it's long. It's actually longer than the bed of my truck. So how do I transport an e-bike like this or how do I transport two e-bikes or even two e-bikes and two mountain bikes at the same time? Well in this video we're going to help you out and come up with a solution for that. I'm Randy and welcome to Zephyr Travels. As you can see I'm surrounded by a number of bikes and if I needed to transport all these bikes at the same time they probably would fill the back of my truck and most likely they'd get scratched because they're going to move and they're going to fall and there's really not a good way to transport bicycles in the back of a truck. Now you can do like a lot of people do with mountain bikes and they put them over the tailgate like this and put the front wheel with the tailgate here and that sort of works and I've done that when we wanted movement for a shorter distance but it's not the most secure way. We got contacted by Young Electric and they make bike racks that are designed to transport e-bikes. You know e-bikes have a unique situation like I mentioned at the beginning of the video. They're heavy. This bike is nearly 80 pounds. If I had two of these we'd be transporting 160 pounds of bike. These e-bikes here are well over 40 pounds so two of those are 80 pounds. Most bike racks that carry bikes like this are really only designed to carry a 35 pound bike so these bikes are much heavier than two of these even so transporting them can be an issue. When Young Electric reached out to us and said hey we'd love for you to try our new e-bike rack and it's actually a hybrid rack meaning it will carry e-bikes and standard bikes and it will carry up to four of them at a time. We thought hey this sounds kind of cool and it's something that we thought maybe our viewers might be interested in so we said yeah send us one. So they've sent us the rack and I'm going to show it to you on the bike but first I'm going to cut back to when we did the unboxing and the assembly of the rack and we'll show you that and then we're going to come back here and we're going to see the rack on the bikes. We're going to unbox the bike rack and I apologize up front for my voice. I got up this morning and I'm starting to lose it for whatever reason but I wanted to get this video done because we want to go for a bike ride and test these test this bike rack out. So we have two boxes here. One box is the add-on kit and the other one is the bike rack. I'm going to pull the bike rack box open first and we'll get the items out and see what's in here. The hybrid rack and add-on extension comes packed in two boxes. Be careful the boxes are very heavy. One of the things that I appreciated is the racks are environmentally packed with cardboard. No foam or non-recyclable materials were used. Start your assembly by unpacking the boxes and laying out the components. There is a small box of hardware included cross-referenced the components with the parts list and the manuals. The assembly of the hybrid rack and add-on extension is pretty easy. You need the following tools. A 13 millimeter wrench or socket, a 17 millimeter wrench or socket, a 19 millimeter wrench or socket, a 24 millimeter wrench or socket, and an adjustable wrench can be substituted for any of these if you don't have these particular sizes. I found that the manuals are very easy to follow and offer some good assembly tips. I started the assembly of the hybrid rack first. The first parts to assemble are the middle support tube and hitch receiver tube. Align the holes and install the quick release bolt and safety pin. Next install the 16 millimeter bolt and tighten the lock nut using the 24 millimeter wrench. No need to over tighten this nut. The two tubes need to be able to pivot here just to snug the nut so that the bolt is not loose. It is suggested here to mount the assembly into your vehicle hitch receiver. This is a good suggestion. I did not do this. The day we were assembling the bike rack it was over a thousand degrees outside and we decided to work in the garage. Next install the front wheel cradle on the tray rails. The bolts for this are pre-installed on the tray rails and will need to be removed before assembly. Lincoln's inspecting. He wants to make sure we do good work because we tow him around more parts. Lincoln's decided to lay down and supervise. Be sure to know which side of the front wheel cradle goes up. It's very easy to install this upside down if you're not careful. Ask me how I know. Repeat the step for the second front wheel cradle. Slide the two M8 carriage bolts into the tray rails and secure the tray rails to the main frame. These tray rails are adjustable and can be moved when fitting your bikes to the rack. Next install the two middle support bars to the main frame rail using the hardware and the slotted washer. Note there are two different middle support bars. I found that the shorter bar worked better in the rear closest to the hitch giving me additional room between the middle support bar and my vehicle. Loosen the wing nut on the adjustable arms and slide them into the middle support bars. The add-on extension rack follows the same steps as the hybrid bike rack starting with the front wheel cradles. I will fast forward through these steps. Well now that we showed you the assembly of the bike rack let's show you the bike rack and we're mounted on the truck. Put some bikes on it and go for a bike ride I guess. So let me go get the bike rack. This is the bike rack all assembled. It slides right into your receiver hitch and we're going to do that and show you how to secure it to your vehicle so that you can leave it on here and not worry about it wandering off on you. Now it uses a threaded bolt or a pin and so that goes in to the bike rack and then this locks it in place but you also thread it in and tighten it down it helps keep the rattles it keeps it secure so we do that. Do this while the rack is folded up like this. So this pin goes right here and as with any type of receiver hitch everything's lined up. It's always a tricky part. Once it's lined up it threads into the bike rack itself and you just want to grab a wrench and snug it down. I could have got a bigger wrench. Then this pin goes in on the other side right here like that. Now you have an anti-rattle piece here that you want to install. It's a u-bolt with a bracket on the bottom and it just slips like that underneath the receiver and you want to tighten that with a ratchet. These are self-locking nuts so you don't have to worry about them coming loose and like I said this will secure this on here. It also prevents it from wandering off. People aren't going to be walking through a parking lot with tools to take this apart. This pivot point right here and there's a pin that you take out and it allows you to fold this down. Put the pin in to lock it in the lower position and now we're just about ready to put a on it. These will go up. I have found that your sprockets and such might get in the way of this bar if you don't put it up to begin with but we're going to see if we can do that. So you want to load your heaviest bike on first. So we're going to put the big e-bike on here. I'll go get that. This bike weighs almost 80 pounds with the battery in it. They do actually offer a ramp system that you can get which would make sense for a bike this size to be able to wheel it up on a ramp. We're going to just start with the front wheel. Get it on the rack. Wheel it forward and then here we're going to pick up the back of the bike until we get to the rear wheel and then roll that forward. Get the strap out of the way. Let this drop right in to the front wheel cradle. Like I said your pedals can get caught on this bar. Move that out of the way. I'm going to start by using this stabilizing bar and line this up to the crossbar of the bike like this. These straps go really easy and then tighten it down here. Then you want to come over and do your wheel straps. They tighten down just as easy like that. Front wheel. The rear wheel, this piece here slides. You want to set this up so it's tight against the wheel. It's on a camber lock. Lock that down and then slip your strap through the wheel and lock everything in place. Now everything is nice and secure. We're going to bring the second e-bike. This is a lighter bike. This bike weighs about 45 pounds with the battery and we're going to put that in this position. On this bike I'm going to use the seat post as my second stabilization point. Get that right here and secure it. There we go. Now the front wheel is in the cradle. Bring this through the spokes, lock it in position, and do the same with the rear. Be careful on the rear that you don't go over the chain. And there you have it. Two e-bikes loaded onto the rack. We're ready to go. If you happen to have two larger e-bikes like this, they do offer a rack that has the capability of handing the larger tires. And so you could have both of those bikes on that. They also offer a rack setup that actually has a ramp to make it easier for these heavier e-bikes to go on. So this is good but wait a minute. I said what if you wanted to bring two other bikes with you? Maybe you've got some friends and they've got a couple mountain bikes and or your kids and they've got mountain bikes and you want to bring them with you. How can we add more bikes to this? I'm glad you asked. Right here we have the add-on module and this will hold two more bikes. This is rated at 60 pounds and when you combine it on here you bring the whole rack capacity up to 250 pounds. It attaches with a bolt in the nut and now let's get some bikes. We now have all four bikes securely mounted to the rack and we're ready to go for a bike ride. That will be next. We just completed a little test drive to see how the bike rack performed with all the bikes on there and I actually think it did really well. It's very secure. It doesn't seem to move around a lot. I mean there's a little bit of sway but nothing compared to what I would think it would be like considering how far away it extends from the truck. A couple things to keep in mind when you have this on your is it does extend quite a ways from the truck and so you want to make sure that you keep that in mind when you're backing up and parking the truck. But the advantage here is that you can when you take the bikes off you can fold this rack up against the truck and we're going to show you how to do that now. I really like these attachment points. They hold the bike very securely and it's very easy to lock them in place and to take them off. I like to take the straps and re-secure them so that they're out of the way when you know you've got the bikes off. Now when it comes to the e-bike the heavy one I do find it's easier to roll it off the rack as opposed to lifting it like I did with the other bikes. I mean we're talking the difference here of 30 to 45 pounds and 80 pounds. Now as you've noticed as I've taken the bikes off I do fold these stabilizer bars down to get them out of the way and I've re-attached all the straps. So now I'm going to pull the pin here that allows it to pivot. Now it's stowed up out of the way. I could leave it on here when I'm not using it. Obviously it does get in the way of getting into the tailgate if you had it in a vehicle with a hatch or something that's going to be a problem too. But for when we're at the trail and we want to go for a ride and get this out of the parking lot it works pretty good. And if you're going to be using your bikes a lot and you want to keep it on your truck or your vehicle you can do that too. Now we think we're going to go for a bike ride but we're not going to take all four bikes we're just going to take the two e-bikes. So I'm going to convert this back to a two bike rack and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put it back in the upper position so it's easier to get to the attachment points. And right here we have a bolt that needs to be loosened or removed actually. Now I'm able to just lift this right off and set this side apart and set this part aside. There just like that in less than five minutes I converted it from a four bike rack to a two bike rack. We're all loaded up with two bikes and ready to go. We're going to take a bike ride now and I hope you enjoyed this video and found it useful. If you're interested in getting your own bike rack from Young Electric there will be a link in the description that you can purchase one and I do believe if you put Zephyr Travels in the the box you will get a $15 discount on the rack so hopefully you do. We'd appreciate that and we want to thank Young Electric for sending us the rack and for us to give it a try. We appreciate that from them. Although they did send us the rack this video was entirely our opinion. They had no input into the video and what we were going to say or how we were going to use the rack but we did follow their guidelines and how to use the rack obviously. So I guess now we're just going to go take a bike ride. Okay. All right so until the next time we'll see everybody down the road and if you haven't subscribed remember to subscribe to our channel Zephyr Travels. All right. Thank you. Thank you.