Video Transcript for Kuat Dirtbag Bike Rack Review

Hi everyone, Aidan here with etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at the Kuat Dirtbag fork block bike rack. It's gonna be a direct mount option somewhere in your truck bed. You can kind of pick and choose how you want to mount it up. It's gonna be a way to attach your bikes with a through axle. It's gonna be a 15 by 110 millimeter boost through axle and give you a way to mount it up and carry it in your truck bed very securely.

And here's a closer look at that fork block. It's gonna be a 15 by 110 millimeter through axle and it's a steel construction with a black powder coat finish. Overall, the construction feels really nice. All the welds here feel high quality and the powder coat feels very durable. So I don't think you'll have to worry about rust and corrosion.

You will have to provide your own mounting hardware where you're going to be bolting it onto something screwing it into a piece of wood, anything like that. And you'll notice we chose to mount ours to a wood two by four right now. It's a very solid mount but right here at the base there's a bit of overhang because the plate here is a little bit wider. So for some outside dimensions on this it's gonna be four and one quarter of an inch wide and one and three quarters of an inch deep with those holes slightly offset towards the back. But personally, for the setup we have right now I am confident it's not going anywhere.

It's definitely mounted solid but that plate doesn't fit on the board super well. So depending on your truck, you might have a similar setup where you've got a piece of wood vertically in those pockets right there in which case you might look into adding an extra piece on top of it that's gonna be a little bit wider. Or if you've got an additional ridge somewhere in the truck bed where you can lay a piece of wood horizontally, that would be a better mounting surface. It just depends on how you've got your truck set up and how you choose to mount this up. And because our piece of wood isn't directly anchored to anything, I chose to add a cam buckle strap over the frame of the bike down to our tie down points just to add some extra security and downward pressure.

But with that, I don't think it's gonna be going anywhere and I think that's a good time for us to take it out on our test course and see how it performs. And as for how it performed on the test course, I'd say it did really well. Everything for the most part was completely solid. Going over the speed bumps, I did have a little bit of lift on the back tire here, but it was very minor. Everything else side to side was great and everything up front was solid, that mount didn't move at all. and a couple things I really liked about driving with it. I could see out the back window just fine, even with this setup in the center of my truck bed. So if you maybe had two of these blocks set to the outside edges of your truck bed, I think it'd be even better because you leave the middle usable still for stuff. But the outside edges where you've already got headrests in the way, you're not really gonna be blocking anything additional, keeping this very low profile and out of the way. One thing I didn't love was having to have my tailgate open. For a short bed truck this is gonna be a problem, but tying down the tailgate and running a strap or a rope down to the safety chain loop of your hitch actually worked really well. I didn't have any noise or rattling from this going over the speed bumps and driving around. So if you have to have this and have your tailgate open for clearance issues then I think this is gonna be a perfectly fine solution. So there's a lot of different options I could compare this to. If you like this method of mounting up your bike, one way I would consider looking is something like the Swagman Impakt. That's going to be essentially the same thing. It's a fork block, but it will work with a variety of different through axles and have an option for a quick release skewer. In addition to that, it's a bit more narrow so it mounts to the side of this board a lot more cleanly. So if you're running a set up similar to what we have today I found that it worked better. In addition to that, you might look into a hitch mounted bike rack. Let's say you've got a short bed truck, you're having the tailgate problems when you're going over bumps and you can't close the tailgate with your bike loaded in. That can be a pretty big inconvenience. In that instance, you might look into a hitch mounted rack or a tailgate pad where the bike is draped over the tailgate in a closed position or you just forget about the truck bed entirely and go for a hitch mounted option. That can be a great way to carry an e-bike because you're not lifting it up as high as you would be into your truck bed. You've got versatility for the ways you mount it and there's tons of options out there for hitch mounted racks. The only thing to keep in mind there is it will be a bit more costly and then you're adding length to the outside of your truck. So if you want to keep things within the bed, tailgate pad or fork blocks, the way I would go.