Carrying Bicycles

One of the main reasons we travel is to ride our mountain bikes. In doing research, I saw pictures of Aliners with 2" hitch receivers on the back. So I thought, fine, we will put our bike rack on the back and that will solve the bike problem.

Boy was I wrong. The issue of a bike rack on the back of an Aliner is a known problem I have found. Most people will tell you that it can't be done and if you do you will rip the bumper off the trailer, sending your bikes down the highway to wreack havoc or bend your frame around the axle. This caused us great stress because I found this out after we had purchased the Aliner.

The requirement of carrying bikes lead me down a long path of modifications.

The next thing I found was that our current bike rack was not certified for  use on the back of a trailer. Vibrations from rocking back and forth and up and down stresses the welds on some bike racks causing catastrophic failure. The folks at Hollywood Racks claim that they have seen 100 failures with racks used on the back of trailers and do not allow their racks to be used in that application. So now we needed a new rack. It turns out that a Canadian company, Swagman, makes a rack certified for use on the back of a travel trailer. Swagman bolts the rack together rather than depending on welds and they have you lock the quick release, that allows you to fold up the rack when not in use, so that it reduces the vibration.

I then called ALiner and talked to Kevin,the head of service. He told me you absolutely canNOT add a 2" hitch receiver to the back of an Aliner. I asked him "Then why do I see pictures of Aliners with 2" hitch receivers in the back?"

He explained that, in the past, Aliner offered 2" hitch receivers with a strict limit of 125lbs. But so many people abused that limit, with dire consequences, that they stopped adding hitches.

Well, that left us with a big problem. After doing a lot more research I found that one of the problems is the Aliner bumper. It is a U-shaped bumper welded to the end of the frame. It is easy to overload something attached to it and rip the bumper off the back of the trailer. 

To solve this problem, I found an add-on by Ultrafab. It is a tube of steel that spans the two frame members that the bumper is attached to, and is welded to join the two frame members with the steel tube. So there is no weight on the bumper. The steel tube Ultrafab comes with a 2" welded-on receiver.

 

I found a YouTube video where someone used this device to successfully reinforce the frame allowing him to add a bike rack. No guarantees, but if I kept to the 125lb limit this seemed like a safe solution. After 1,200 miles, so far so good. We do inspect the welds at every gas stop and I strap the bikes down so they cannot sway around.

Adding extra weight in the back will change the weight on the tongue. Just like a teeter totter, if you put more weight on the back, you need to balance the weight in the front to maintain the tongue weight. If the tongue weight is not 10-15% of the trailer gross weight you can get sway where the trailer starts to move from one side of the road to the other in oscillations that, in the worst case, can cause it to flip over. Not good. But you must keep to the limits of your tow vehicle hitch to not overload the tow hitch with too much weight on the ball mount.

These are all very serious considerations when driving down the highway.

We now realized, unlike with the Jayco, where we just took what ever we wanted to with us, we were going to have to be much more careful with the ALiner. So we started a spreadsheet and measured the weight of everything we were going to put into the trailer. It was very revealing.

 

In no way am I recommending you do what we did by adding a bike rack. What I've described here is just information and it could be a bad idea.

>> After 3600 miles all is well. No cracks in the welds and no trouble with the bikes <<