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Yakima SideWinder Roof Mounted Bike Rack Review

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Review of a Yakima SideWinder Roof Mounted Bike Rack


Today we are going to show you part number Y02071 from Yakima. This is their SideWinder Bicycle Rack. It is specially designed for tandem bicycles. It mounts on a normal roof rack - either round bars or square bars. It actually pivots out away from the vehicle, making it a lot easier to load your tandem bicycle on it. At this point, we will go ahead and mount this on a typical roof rack and give you a little bit better idea of how it works.

These adapter clips right here snap onto your bars, and then the hardware for the rack itself bolts in through here and then clamps everything into place. You have two that go onto the rear and then on the front, two of them will actually use a U-bolt to clamp onto the front crossbar. Next we will go ahead and install the strap on the bicycle. What the strap will do is keep the handlebars straight on the bike as you load it up and go down the road. Now, how you attach these is going to be a little bit different for each bicycle, since there are different types of handlebars out there. Basically, on this one you do not want a position where it slides off the handle, so we will loop it around and then back over itself. Then take your third strap, and that will go back to your seat post. And then just tighten up the buckle. All right, and it is ready to be loaded onto the bicycle rack.

All right, now that we have got our bicycle rack installed, we will go ahead and load up our bike. A couple of things you need to take care of first we need to swing out our fork mount so we can put our bike on. This little knob and spring-loaded assembly right here just unscrew it and you can just swing it out away from the vehicle. This is your fork mount right here the forks go in here and here. And what is really nice about this, in some applications you have a nut you have to spin on the other side to tighten it up, actually on this one everything is done on one side. So you put your bike up in there, twist it down, and then lock it into place. It is actually pretty neat. And also, once you have it latched into place, you can a lock core here from Yakimas Same Key System. And then on the back half here, you want to get these clamps out of the way. Just push the red buttons and the whole assembly comes out. All right, now we can load up our bike.

And it is securely latched into place. All right, then you can just pick your bike up and swivel it into place. And when you put it on the cradle, you want to go ahead and get a chain past it on the other side, since it is not sitting in the cradle. Get it centered in the cradle, and then go ahead and put your straps back in. Then go back up to the front and secure the front pivot point. And with that, the bicycle is ready to go down the road. All right, and that covers it for our review of part number Y02071 from Yakima. This is their SideWinder Bicycle Rack.


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