Had a few questions about the mountian bike setup I have on my rear bumper. So the rear bumper started out as a kit from northwest trail innovations. I can’t remember his name right off, but the owner of the company (1 man show) was awesome. His customer service was excellent, and everytime I sent him a message he got right back with me. There was a few parts left out the kit, and he shipped them out the next day to me!
Anyways, I put the rear bumper together and decided to make my own custom touches. My main thing I wanted was to haul my mountian bikes around, without using a hitch mount. So I come up with a plan on how I wanted to do it.
my requirements was as followed...
Needs to hold 2 full-size mountian bikes
Swingout still needs to function
Needs to be quickly attached/detached
Alright, first thing here is the lower mount. I purchased these offline on a bike shop online. I can’t remember what site it was right off. These work great and when ratcheted down, they hold the bike very still!
I had some 1/2” tabs left over from another project a while back. These just to happen to work out perfectly with these tire mounts. Once the height of the bike was set,
So this part here was the key to everything working. In case your not familiar with mountian bikes. They use a large bolt (thru-axle) that threads between the 2 forks and holds the tire in place. Basically what I did was figure out the thru axle diameter, and got a guy on eBay to turn me down some delrin bushings. The center hole is where the thru axle rides. The outside of the bushing is stepped. This allows the bushing to ride inside a 1” DOM tube.
(There is a reason I used dom. It doesn’t have a seam running on the inside, meaning the inside is perfectly round)
I simply slid the bushings into the pipe, bolted it on the bike...and then tack welded the part on where my bike fit be
Here is a better shot of the lower mount, and also the upper mount. I’d like to note... the blue bike (outside bike) would mount with the handle bars sticking out the other way. However it stuck out past the side of the truck roughly 1’. I didn’t like that as I thought it looked tacky. Mounting it this way does have the same effect, but it sticks straight up, not out.
also, the end section where the fork is mounted actually pivots. This made it a lot easier to mount the bike and then also fit bikes of different sizes.
Lastly is a picture of both bikes mounted up. The rear tires sit about flush with the bottom of the rear bumper. I don’t really intend on going Offroad much with these mounted. Most of our trails are state parts abs are well maintained. If I’m dragging my rear bumper I have issues haha.
One goal of mine was to not have the bike tire riding inside the cab. I did this for a few reasons... primarily because I don’t want a large dirty bike tire inside my truck. Also because I wanted to access everything needed to haul my bikes from the rear of my truck without opening the swingout.
So basically I just got some threaded rod that’s about the same diameter as my wheel spindle, and welded a threaded union on the tire carrier. I then drilled a hole through that so it threads on and a pin goes though it. I think this setup is really clean and allows the bike tire to mount flush to my 35” spare!
Sorry for the long drawn out post. This stuff could easily be explained in a video. I purchased a nice camera setup to start recording stuff, but I don’t know if people are interested in that or not!? Let me know!
, that's some serious creativity fella!! I have a rear bumper from NWTI for the 4th gen and he makes a decent product with a lot of BEEFAGE!
