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Warned my buddy about towing with the rear rack vs a trailer, wish I had pushed harder
Last month my riding buddy Kyle picked up an old Honda Foreman and wanted to haul a small log splitter about 2 miles up a dirt road to his deer camp near Eureka Springs. I told him to borrow my 4x8 trailer instead of strapping it to the rear rack, and he said the rack was fine because the splitter only weighed around 300 pounds. He went with the rack anyway. About a mile in, the rear rack bolts sheared off at the frame and the splitter flipped into the ditch, bent the tongue, and took out his left taillight. Took us 3 hours with a come along and a log chain to drag it out, and now he is looking at 200 bucks in frame welding plus a new rack. The tongue weight on those rear racks is way less than people think, and the bounce on washboard gravel multiplies the load a lot. Has anyone else had a rack fail like that, or am I overthinking how much weight those things can really hold?
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jessicaramirez12h ago
The "bounce on washboard gravel multiplies the load" part is what most guys never get. It's not just the 300 pounds sitting still, it's that the rack is bolted to the frame with a few small bolts that were never meant to handle a dynamic load bouncing up and down. Every bump is like hitting that rack with a hammer, and over a mile of that stuff the bolts are gonna shear off every time. A trailer puts all that weight on the axle and springs where it belongs, so the bike only feels the tongue weight. Your buddy got lucky it was just the splitter and not the whole rack coming apart at speed on him.
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