We became hip to the Bike Tree through some friends in SF. It is a pretty basic design for a bike rack: a big metal “T” wrapped in a protective hose to avoid scraping up the rims of your bike, connected to struts that are braced to a square frame. The rack is stablized by a 30″ square base, and adjusts from 69″ to 72″ high. It rolls about on four 3″ swivel casters, making it easier to mount and remove your bikes.

The rack touts the capacity to store up to six bikes, while taking just four feet of space. It sounded like an ideal solution to our storage woes.

We've got lots of bikes. The problem is where to put them?

The price of the rack shipped is extremely reasonable, and downright affordable, at considerably less than $100. Average prices we found were around $60-79 shipped. We found the best pricing from harborfreight.com, although it was listed on ebay from a number of vendors as well. When it arrived, we unboxed it to find this:

Unboxing the Cyle Tree

Assembly was relatively painless, although I ended up pulling out my drill driver and enlarging a few of the holes to ease the assembly, as a number of them didn’t line up correctly. The low cost of the product was evident here, but this was a non-issue for me. Years working in a bike shop teaches one to simply “make it work.”

Once assembled, we did manage to fit six bikes on the rack. However, when we had two downhill bikes and two all mountain bikes on it, I decided that limiting it to two on each arm would be the wiser way to go, and it looked considerably less cluttered in our living space.

Cycle Tree loaded with the big bikes

All things said, we’re pretty stoked on the Cycle Tree, and recommend it. It didn’t completely solve our storage issues, but it worked well for storing the bikes I couldn’t lock in the garage. It isn’t the highest quality unit we’ve seen, but it not only gets the job done, but looks solid, and holds the bike I do have mounted on it well. Shout out to Gideon for turning us on to it.

Buy it here:
www.harborfreight.com

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Related posts:

1. Xport Bikes Aloft 2 Storage Rack
2. Reviewed: Kuat NV 2 Bike Rack
3. Shopping for a hitch rack: The Northshore 6-Bike Rack

When you have as many bikes as we do, finding a place for them all can be a challenge- especially living in an urban environment like San Francisco where living spaces tend to be small. Even in our new Portland digs, we are finding space to be at a premium. Fortunately, there are quite a few options available for stashing bikes in one’s home or garage.

Available through Performance Bikes, the Xport Bikes Aloft 2 is a freestanding strorage rack that is unique among the offerings in that it offers modular accessories for customizing the rack. The adjustable arms have the capacity to hold two bikes each. As they are adjustable, they can be raised or lowered to accomodate frames with dramatic angles.

Xport Bikes Aloft 2 Storage rack

The arms each come with a cradle, and we ended up wrapping the lower arms with bar tape, as it made it easier to set the bikes up and remove them. While the rack states it can handle four bikes total, we rarely stored four downhill, freeride or all mountain bikes on it. With the various frame types, it was difficult to set them all up. I was also somewhat nervous about bikes coming off. However, it would accept hardtails and road bikes easily. The drawback was that with four bikes loaded, it was visually quite messy. When displaying two bikes, it looked asthetically pleasing.

A storage hook bar is also available. However, with four bikes and gear hanging off of it, it isn’t the best looking set up. The storage hook bar wasn’t the best the most solid attachment, but if adjusted well, it rarely caused issues.

Overall, it has been a useful item to have around, and it works as advertised. Once we removed the stickers on it, it was a nice looking way to display bikes.

Xport Bikes Aloft 2 rack with two 30lb-ish bikes displayed.

At a retail price of $89.00 it is fairly reasonably priced, although Performance puts it on sale periodically.

Check it out here.

Related posts:

1. Cycle Tree Compact Bike Storage
2. Shopping for a hitch rack: The Northshore 6-Bike Rack
3. Reviewed: Kuat NV 2 Bike Rack