One of the coolest booths for me at NAHBS 2008 was from Pass and Stow. Matt Feeney has designed a nice porteur rack that can fit on almost any fork and which has a good size platform (not huge, not tiny) and which can hold panniers too. He also worked with Freight Bags to develop a bag for the rack, and came up with a really clever attachment system based on "Lift the Dot" fasteners.
I bought one of the bags that was at the show as soon as I could. It arrived on Saturday and I quickly assembled this rack for it:
It looks a lot like most of the racks that I've made. It has one unique feature, which are the lift the dot studs on the bottom of the rack. There are four for them, one for each corner of the bag. The bag has four matching mounts and they click together like this:
This mounting system makes it very easy to install and remove the bag. It is a big improvement from bungie cords.
The bag itself is wonderful for commuting. It is large, much larger than a Ostrich or Berthoud bag. It is built like a messenger bag with a waterproof liner on the inside and a rough Cordura fabric on the outside. There is one large main pocket and a smaller front pocket that secures with velcro. The shoulder strap is made of seatbelt webbing and the bag is comfortable to wear as a messenger bag even with it's unique proportions.
A cool feature that I missed at the show are "long flap" straps like the ones on a Carradice. This lets you overstuff the bag and ride with it wide open while having a secure load. I'm sure this will come in handy when stopping by the grocery store after commuting home.
There are compression straps on the side which let you cinch down the bag when it isn't full. This is how it looks with my normal load:
The bag is a little wide for 42cm drop bars (I doubt that it was designed with drop bars in mind), but the width makes it possible for my (smallish) laptop to fit. I think it will be a more comfortable fit with 44cm drop bars and may switch.
I consider this rack a "prototype" because I experimented with a few things on it. I tried two different methods of making brazeons for the "Lift the Dot" studs. The studs themselves are threaded #8-32 with brass (pretty soft) bolts. The better mount that I made for them just consisted of a very short section of 1/4" x 0.058" tubing mitered and brazed to the bottom of the rack. After brazing I drilled out the center with a #29 drill bit and tapped for the #8-32 bolt. I also tried drilling 1/4" holes in the rack and using a longer section of the 1/4" x 0.058" tubing, but that was fussier to keep aligned and required more work.
I also played with different methods of attaching the rack to the frame. I made a lug for the left stay by drilling out the center of 3/8" steel rod to a 5/16" hole (the same diameter as my rack tubing). I then filed down a tab to mount to the frame. My brazing on this is pretty ugly, but the lug looks nice and wasn't hard to make. I think I'll do it again:
I copied the Rene Herse fork crown mount and I'm pretty happy with how that came out:
That is a 180 degree half circle of 5/16" x 0.035" tubing. Mitered at the halfway point is another section of 5/16" x 0.028" and a M6 stud (long bolt with the head cut off) is brazed into that sleeve.
The backstop on the rack is brazed onto the back of the rack instead of the top, which gives it kind of a nice flow. It is a bit annoying to get all of the bends to line up correctly though, and my backstop isn't exactly square with the rack. It's fine for a prototype:
Great bag, good enough rack. You can order the bags through Matt and Pass and Stow.