Afternoon all!

I recently bought a Kona Sutra with a view to dabbling in a bit of cycle touring over the next few years. One of the things that sold it to me was that it came pre-equipped with front and rear pannier racks. I added some Vaude Aqua panniers to the order and assumed I’d be good to go. Well, I really should know better by now that it wouldn’t be that simple!

It turns out that the front pannier bags will not fit on the front rack (Blackburn FL-1) as there is a flat steel plate welded to the underside of the top tube on the rack. It seems there are very few ‘modern’ bags that will fit this rack. So I done some digging and found that everyone raves about the Tubus racks, so I ordered a Tubus Tara from Wiggle and assumed I’d be good to go. Not so!

The fork on the Sutra is quite chunky all the way down to the dropouts, so chunky in fact that the hoop part of the Tara rack will only sit at one angle when bolted to the dropout tab mounts. When I try to install the top rods of the rack they are too short to reach the higher mounts on the forks. As the chunky fork lowers stop the hoop-part of the rack from moving round, there is no way of making it fit! I had considered bodging some sort of huge spacer and long bolt so that the rack would sit proud of the forks, but I’ve decided against this due to the extra leverage and strain that would then be created on the dropout tab mounts.

So the options as I see them are:
1) Find a rack that will fit on chunky forks (with disk brakes)
2) Find a pannier that will fit on the Blackburn rack that came supplied
3) Bodge something – I’d rather avoid this if at all possible

I’ve attached some pics to try to make it clearer. Just wondering if the any of the resident clever people have any suggestions of what might fit?

Can’t see from the photos, but have you already used the tubular spacers that come with the Tara to move it away from the fork leg? Don’t be afraid to pull the rack a bit more open, it’s quite springy. Otherwise get some rubber coated “P” clips and mount them round the thick part of the fork leg.

Yes, even with that spacer installed it is still stuck under the fork tubes. I reckon it would need a ~45mm spacer on each side to allow it to move round enough.

P-clips might be the way to go. Trying to find contact info for Tubus themselves to see what they suggest, but they seem to have removed their email address from their webpage.

just a contact form (available linked only through the German section)
http://www.tubus.com/contact.php

Ah! Good find! Thank you!

Well Tubus weren’t especially helpful 🙁 Don’t suppose the language barrier helped. Think it will be a case of trying to drill and file the original Blackburn rack down to allow the Vaude bags to fit.

What about some of these?
If you mount them at the very bottom of the leg above the dropout the Tara should fit fine.

Yep, reckon they would do the job – that will be the backup option for if/when I destroy the blackburn rack in a fit of childish rage.

Try a freeload or whatever its called now that Thule own the IP for it.
http://www.freeload.co.nz/