A rear rack on a full-suspension mountain bike: an owner’s setup

Hello everyone! The guides section mentions suspended racks for full-suspension bikes. I wanted to share how I fitted conventional rear pannier racks to two of our full-suspension bikes using a simple custom arrangement.

The racks were b’Twin models from Decathlon. For each bike I used a sufficiently long M6 bolt and a home-made aluminium bracket. The setup carried about 15 kg over our 900 km, twelve-day trip from Braunau in Austria to Budapest the previous August.

This is an archived owner contribution from 2010, not a verified installation guide or a load rating for another bicycle. The original photographs are no longer available. The former forum contact for Ant1606 is also unavailable.

A later version on a Rockrider 6.3

I experienced no interference despite the suspension travel. Unfortunately, the bike was stolen, so I repeated the arrangement on a new 2009 Rockrider 6.3. The following year it carried a reported 15–18 kg over a 1,200 km northern European tour, including Belgian and Dutch cobbles.

The original route was recorded on EveryTrail, a historical external link.

The principle was similar, but I used a home-made flat aluminium bracket to connect the rack to the moving rear triangle’s crosspiece. The pale bracket in the original photograph was separate from the black plastic strip used as a mudguard.

The bracket was 50 mm wide to resist sideways twisting and worked mainly in tension and compression. I observed no deformation. The photograph was not particularly clear, but it was the only one showing the arrangement without bags.

I also slightly bent the rack’s support arms to obtain the required position and attached the arms directly at the wheel axle.

These are the contributor’s observations about those particular bikes. They do not establish compatibility, suspension clearance or an approved mounting method for other frames and racks.