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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