Feedback Sports Velo Wall Rack 2D

The Feedback Sports Velo Wall Rack 2D will show off your pride and joy – no matter how weird your tubes may be.

Twenty years ago, hanging a bike on a wall was easy. Most bikes had horizontal top tubes, and they were all an inch or so round, making the wall rack designer's job an easy one. How times have changed.

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Nowadays your average road bike (in fact, pretty much any bike) is a flowing, curvaceous mix of hydroformed aluminium, carbon swoops and all manner of aero and flex-enabling or restricting cross-sections. We, the people, have cast off the lumbar-straining shackles of faux-pro-level geometries and embraced the upright – while also demanding cossetted botties. Top tubes and seatstays have merged into continuous forms to accommodate longer, more compliant seatposts and ever-more-innovative seat tube junctions.

Ergo, when designing a product to hang a modern bike on a wall without painting yourself into a corner dictated by specific tube arrangements, you need to do something rather special. That's the Feedback Sports Velo Wall Rack 2D then. The rack is rated for 22kg, so will support even the heftiest downhill rig, but possibly not your new German e-KommuturMotoWagën. It's available in black or silver.

To cater for all these weird angles, shapes and sizes you need infinite adjustment vertically. To accommodate a mix of narrow road bike and wide mountain bike/hybrid handlebars you need the ability to shift the mounting arms relative to each other to angle the bike out from the wall. The 2D rack allows this up/down, in/out adjustment (2D – geddit?) by simple tweaking of a 3mm Allen key (provided) in one of six boltheads on the side and arms. The setup process takes just a minute to get more or less spot on, depending on whether you have a partner to give the 'up a bit, down a bit' guidance.

The rack backplate mounts using two supplied screws suited for wood – if you're going into masonry you'll need your own plug fittings good for the weight of your bike. It's advisable to set the rack up on your frame, balanced, adjusted to hold it level, then lift the whole lot up against the wall to make sure you have vertical and fore-aft clearances right. What you don't want to do is drill holes only to find you can't open a door, cupboard or lift the bike on without whanging a wheel or shifter. This positioning is definitely easier with a pencil-wielding friend to mark the final resting place, then it's a case of drilling the two holes and job done. The construction of the rack is solid – once done up there's not a bit of slop and only the smallest amount of springy flex in the steel arms.

The arms end in rubber-coated V-shaped cups, stepped to provide even the strangest of profiles a snug fit. A bonus of the V-profile is that if you have under-tube cabling it will pass through without being held against the tube underside – even down to traditional steel tube diameters around the 25-26mm mark. At their full extension the centreline of the cups sit 305mm out from the wall, meaning they will accommodate a handlebar width of 610mm before the bike needs shifting from parallel to the wall with the bar straight. The minimum distance is 203mm, allowing you to pull the rear wheel back into the wall if space is at a real premium.

There's something very pleasing to the eye having your clean and gleaming machine at head height. It facilitates a passing twirl of the pedals, click of the levers or squeeze of the brakes in a casual yet life-affirming way. Indeed, if you are pushed for space the 2D can be used for drivetrain tune-ups or on-bike wheel truing; just don't expect to be doing bottom bracket swaps on it, and make sure you've allowed pedal clearance.

The 2D rack comes with a three-year warranty, but it's hard to imagine what could possibly go wrong with it, the engineering is so solid.

Feedback Sports has come up with a high-quality future-proof solution to bike storage, for whatever's in your fleet or on your wishlist. Your bike deserves nothing less.

Verdict

A high-quality future-proof solution to bike storage, for whatever's in your fleet