What: The Saris Thelma 3 - Rear hitch bike rack system

Why: I needed to acquire a bike rack for the new MINI, and had a few objectives over previous racks, including weight, 3-bike capacity and modular design.

The Saris always caught my eye the entire three times I've seen one in the wild, because of its unique clamshell design. The bar itself is a C-shape that connects at the center to a swivel arm and receiver tongue. Thatswhatshesaid! Anyway, on this frame, the clamshells themselves are plastic with steel inserts. One bites the front wheel, the other cinches to the rear. Easy cheesy. I bought it because it looked to be lighter than other racks, the clamshell design would allow for use with the Mixte frame bike (if my experiment worked) and the modular design allowed it to expand as needed over time.

How'd It Do:

First of all, the rack IS light. It's about half the weight of the all steel Thule that I sold off, and heavier than the previous two-bike platform type model I used ont he last MINI. This is very handy.

The construction appears solid. In my case, I bought from an e-tailer that looks to have boxed up a display model, because the rack was beat to hell in transit, many of the plastic components gouged or scuffed, and some broken and missing parts too. Saris offers lifetime warranty on their gear, and quickly replaced the missing and broken parts via Fed-Ex (even faster than the vendor was able to do) and the rast of the damage is superficial. If you've used a bike rack, you know they wear pretty quickly, between sun and scrapery. So no big deal. And I got it for about $250, a hundred off of retail.

The design is modular, so while this is one of the only 3-bike capacity racks on the market (I wanted to stay away from 4-bike racks, being 2" receiver size, and wanted more than 2-bikes for when Z has a bike to carry.) you can set it up, as I have done, with only two of the three placements. I set them up at far ends so there is space between them to allow the cargo bike extra clearance.


This yellow tab locks the clamshell in front into a clamped position, which is in addition to the straps. It's very solid, yet a thumb-push away from release.


The receiver tongue is on a swivel mount that is held by a single cotter pin that is strung to the rack itself so you don't lose it. very smooth operation.


The rack installed easily. Well, I should say, it took a long time to put together, between waiting for the replacement parts, and assembling it up on the deck, but that's because you have to get it nice and tight in order to hold together, pretty much inevitable with an assembly-required rack. Lots of muscle went into the assembly of the thing, but hey.

In the up position, you can see it's extremely shallow. Especially against the flat vertical surface of the MINI Clubman's barn doors. You could park pretty tight with this on, and hardly be affected. In the up position, you extend the front clamshell 180 degrees and cinch it to the rear shell with straps. Smart design! Note also the red reflectors built into the rack's C-section.


Here it is in the down position. I've put one bike on, my Cinelli X MASH fixed-gear Crook Type 3. Note how the clam tucks in there just so. It's very snug, yet the clamshell pieces are wide enough in their arc section to accommodate knobby tyres. The rack's C-section is fairly long, so no judicious parallel parking here. You can see I left one modular rack placement off, in the middle, which would orient the middle bike in the opposite direction.


My experiment involved Ye Blacke Death, my cargo bike. The build includes wood fenders and knobby tyres. To be clear: Saris does not support the use of fender bikes. But I thought I could make it work. What I ended up doing is taking advantage of this particular fender design to work for me: I loosened the bolts that hold the fender in place on those side support rods, so it could push down against the tyre and create a solid mass. This allows it to tuck up into the clamshell just so. I used some dense packing foam to protect the wood from the clamshell's plastic surface and minimize chafing from road vibration, though I suspect some damage will be inevitable. I was mostly concerned about stability. I used a double-length of strap to get around the wheel and clamshell, cinched it all down, and then pulled hard. It stayed in place. Excellent! Your mileage may vary, and I may lose YBD on the freeway sometime in the future, but it APPEARS solid enough.


View from the front. That's with the cargo bike on the outer position and the Cinelli in the rear. There's actually enough clearance to have the heavier cargo bike on the inside position too.


Another shot, side-view, showing the clearance. Very nice.


So, any cons? Well, I think probably the box could have been better packed, though I have no way of knowing if that was the vendor or the manufacturer. Saris tells me their packages are well padded. The only other issue I see is that I think they sized their receiver tongue a few millimeters too small. It allows the rack to rock a bit in the receiver hitch. Now, all racks rock to some degree, and when they don't, they're impossible to slide in and out, especially if heavy. But this will rock enough that it will introduce a lot of exaggerated moments on the far end of the cantilever, ie. the last bike on the rack. So I will next work up a shim that will hold it a little more snug in the hitch.

So far so good!
Stay tuned for a follow-up, discussing a related mod...

Update:

on the Clubman, the unique way the SARIS pivots on an elevated joint from the hitch level means that it's the first rack i've found that didn't allow the Clubman doors to open, even when folded flat. Now, that said, I use the SARIS for other reasons that outweigh this, but it's something I didn't consider until I mounted the rack. I'm not sure how this would affect the Countryman... on the Club the doors would strike that elevated joint just a few inches from their near corners.

*Granted, Ye Blacke Death, my toddler cargo bike, uses a Mixte frame and can't hang by the top tube it doesn't have, which would have been a problem with that other rack. They sell a top tube surrogate that clamps to seat tube and head tube for this purpose, but between gravity and road vibration, it would undoubtedly grind the frame to bare metal in time. So no loss.



http://teamlopetyreclubbe.com/2011/0...ear-bike-rack/