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Universal bike rack on 'all glass' boot door??

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JonnoMaude 22 Jan 2016
Hey all,

Has anybody on here mounted any universal bike racks onto any of the cars that just have a pane of glass for boot door? I.e citroen c1, Peugeot 106, I think VW do one too etc.

I know that the little clasps would normally go on the metal body of the door, but I'm figuring that the glass has to have been toughened in order to handle being slammed etc..

I'm thinking to go ahead and try it, but wondered if anyone has experienced this and has anything to say?

Thanks a lot
 woppo 23 Jan 2016
In reply to JonnoMaude:

Saris bike racks have a 'soft clamp' to replace the natal hooks where glass extends to the edge of the tailgate, not sure if that is what you mean. Evans stock them.
 gethin_allen 23 Jan 2016
In reply to JonnoMaude:

Most bike racks I've seen warn against use on vehicles like this; I spent a while looking when I had my old fiat Brava. In the end I gave up and just put the bike inside. The best alternative I've seen was to attach the rack support straps to a roof bar. The least convincing method, suggested by paddy hopkirk for one of their racks, involved little plastic dumbbells that you fit on the straps and the trap in the door.
 Hyphin 23 Jan 2016
In reply to gethin_allen:

The least convincing method, suggested by paddy hopkirk for one of their racks, involved little plastic dumbbells that you fit on the straps and the trap in the door.


Have used the Halfords equivalent of these and they worked fine.
 mountainbagger 23 Jan 2016
In reply to JonnoMaude:

I had a bike rack with 3 bikes fall off at 70 mph on a busy motorway. I wouldn't "go ahead and try it" (depending on what you mean by that) if I were you

Not sure what the cause was exactly - could have been my poor fitting or my car being ill suited to that "universal" bike rack. Either way, I'll be more careful choosing and fitting it in future! Or get a roof rack (I have a car with roof bars now), or even a trailer!
 gethin_allen 23 Jan 2016
In reply to Hyphin:

I suppose it depends on how many bikes you want to put on it and what type of bikes, maybe for a couple of sub 10 kg road bikes it would be fine but I wouldn't trust them for a full rack (supposedly 3 in the case of my rack) of 17 kg downhill bikes.
In reply to gethin_allen:

We used to use one like that but you had to carefully push the dumbells out of the way to close the boot. After having done that I needed to reopen the boot to do something else then inattentively closed the boot down on the dumbell....crack!.... spiderweb rear windscreen and the day wasted waiting for the glass repair guy to come to the hostel and put a new rear windscreen in. I would not recommend using this method. One way that might be possible if you can figure out how to do it would be to attach the tapes to the retaining loops that are normally in the boot of your car. The top ones are easy enough as you can feed them through the top of the boot and they can be fixed... I could never figure out how to do the bottom ones as I could not figure out a good way to put on the retaining friction clasps that the tapes go through. (or else it was vice versa...bottom was ok but top was the problem.. can not quite remember now.)
 Wsdconst 23 Jan 2016
In reply to Hyphin:

> The least convincing method, suggested by paddy hopkirk for one of their racks, involved little plastic dumbbells that you fit on the straps and the trap in the door.

> Have used the Halfords equivalent of these and they worked fine.

I used the paddy hopkirk dumbells ones on my wife's car and they worked fine.

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