Flat tow and bike rack

skes · 02-28-2021, 02:59 PM

Hi All, Made the move from a car dolly to flat towing with a blue ox. I purchased their protective shield (KarGard) to hopefully provide a little protection to the toad. I need to take a bike rack, so I purchased a dual hitch extender with a 4 inch drop to accommodate the base plate height. I need to do further testing but it looks like both of the bike racks I have are going to hit the KarGard on tight corners. I've looked at a few options such as a ladder bike rack or adding a 12 inch high/low hitch to lift the bikes another 12 inches higher (which would allow me to still use the bike rack cover). Has anyone else come up with a creative way to solve this problem? Thanks!!

UrbanTarzan · 03-01-2021, 04:41 PM

Carry the bikes on the back of your toad????

**macnut** · 03-02-2021, 09:01 PM

I prefer to carry them on the back of our car, unless we will only be using them onsite. It seems that more times than not we drive to the area we want to ride our bikes. However, I also can move the bikes to the back of the motorhome. We use the RoadMaster TowDefender so there is no issue with cornering. You can use the TowDefender with any tow bar and it has worked well for us.

**creativepart** · 03-03-2021, 07:02 AM

We put our bike rack on the back of the toad. Before doing this we got a dual hitch extension and put the bike rack in between the RV and the toad.

We don’t have a Kargard or anything between the RV and toad for protection, so that wasn’t a problem. But we didn’t like the bikes in the way of connecting/disconnecting the toad.

We had to remove the bikes from the rack to hookup or unhook the toad and that got old quick. Even with the bikes removed just having the empty rack there was an issue.

PS. We’ve towed our car for nearly 40,000 miles without any “protection” and have not seen any ill effect on the front end of the car.

Lmonger · 03-10-2021, 04:55 PM

Thule has decent lightweight sturdy bike carriers.

7997redtail · 03-10-2021, 05:10 PM

Like it says, I built a hitch on the front so I can put the bikes up front and keep them clean and the scooter on back (for now) with a cover to keep it clean.

I did my own but I'm pretty sure any good hitch shop could modify/make up what you need.

3HrTour · 03-10-2021, 07:06 PM

I added a drawbar higher up on the motorhome. I had an old hitch and I cut off only the drawbar portion and welded it to the cross frame behind the engine, pokes thru right near the license plate so if sell the motorhome the plate covers the hole.
The advantage is the bikes are up higher then the hood of the car, so cornering is not an issue and the bikes can stay locked and secure until we need them.