The 1 up bike rack has been my favorite piece of mountain bike equipment that I’ve ever bought. For a while now, I wanted to do a product review on my One Up USA bike rack and finally I got around to doing it.
The one up USA bike rack is so awesome, the convenience of this thing is so great. I want to go straight to the point, if you need a bike rack and you’re not opposed to spending a couple of extra dollars then this bike rack is for you.
How to install the 1 up bike rack?
This bike rack isn’t inexpensive but it is probably the best bike rack I’ve ever seen. It’s heavy, you pick it up, take it out to the car, put it in the hitch, tighten it up and then you open up the catch arms on the rack, you put your bike in, you tighten them up and you go.
As simple as that, you don’t need to mess around with anything else. it’s just that simple. Before this rack I would try to fit my bike in the back of my SUV. It was such a lame game to play, take off the front tire of my bike, angle it in and make sure the chain did not soil the matting.
What a waste of time. I bought the Super Duty model, there are other models that are designed to maybe carry lighter bikes.
For the model I got a hitch mount is required
If your car does not come with a hitch, which is cool, you can install a tow hitch on almost any car these days. It is not too hard to put it on, I did mine myself.
If the receiver is smaller you just pop off the adapter part, slide it into the smaller receiver. You can get the one where you can use a smaller hitch and a bigger hitch.
Built quality of the 1up USA bike rack
All of them are built just the same, in the sense that they’re built with all aluminium, solid aluminium, like thick solid aluminium components and stainless-steel parts.
I’ve bought a lot of bike racks in the past that either rusted out or the little Velcro straps or plastic straps have broken and they just kind of fell apart.
I was tired of buying crappy bike racks so I spent some money and bought this really good one, the 1up USA bike rack. This bike rack is expensive, oh man, but it’s so worth the money, it is, but you get what you pay for and I’ve been using it for many years now without problems.
It’s just great, as long as you’ve got a tow hitch on your car. The 1up USA has taken a couple bumps and bruises over the years and it still works, no problems.
Let me tell you all about it and why I liked it so much.
The first thing it mounts on the bike, mine that I bought is the hitch model, it slides into the hitch and normally you’d put these in, you’d slide it into the hitch, you put a pin and that would lock it from coming out, but it wouldn’t keep it from sliding around.
This one’s got this unique idea of when you slide it in there is this little ball mechanism and a screw. When you tighten this screw or the bolt, it pushes the ball out and locks the bike rack into the hitch.
So, there’s no pin, it locks it in and keeps it from wiggling, so you don’t have your bike rack wiggling back and forth. It is solid. That’s the first thing that I love about it.
The bike rack can also be modified, I have a fat bike so I got these little wider extenders to make those little arms a little bit bigger so they can fit over my fat bike tires. Top that off you can also use this as a bike rack that goes on the top of your car.
Securing the one up bike rack
Once you get this thing on your car, it should be there for pretty long time.
After you put the bike rack in the hitch you’ve got two little methods of security. one is that you can’t take this rack out unless you have the proprietary Allen key.
There is a little hole inside of it and a little pattern that has to match so that you can tighten or loosen it.
You can’t just use a regular Allen key to tighten or loosen the bolt. This helps a little bit with security to make it hard for anyone to steal the bike rack.
In addition, there is an area where you can put a lock right in front of that bolt so you can’t even get to that bolt unless you go and basically cut the lock off first.
How to properly use the one up USA bike rack
So, you’ve got the bike rack on the car, you’ve got the tray down and now you put your bikes in. This is probably the coolest part of the bike rack itself; it has these two arms that go up, okay, you just pull the arms up and there’s these little levers you unhook.
I mean, you pull the arms up and then you put your bike in the tray and then you just lock the arms back in. That’s it, there’s no straps, nothing, you just put it back together and then your bike is in there.
In order to use it you have a little lever that you pull up and then the bike rack will come down. You can lock it into different positions but you pull the lever up and you pull the bike rack down and then you can put your bikes inside of this.
In fact, even the lever has a little lock on it too so that you can’t accidentally pull it up and move it around without having to unscrew this. You don’t have to do that but it’s just another feature of the bike rack.
So easy to get the bike in and out of this rack.
It’s just as easy to get the bike out of the bike rack. To get the bike off the rack you push this little lever down, you pull the arms off and the bike comes right out.
They have these trays; you don’t have to get the hitch model. You get the trays and you can put them on top of your car.
1up USA have a roof rack model as well. It is just as easy to operate; the arms go back and forth and you put the bike on top of the car with the roof rack model.
I can’t say enough good things about this bike rack. It’s built like a tank everything is just solid, it works perfectly and I just absolutely love it.
It is just one of those ones that you just want to totally recommend. If you not opposed to spending a couple extra dollars. This bike rack will basically last forever.
Final thoughts on the 1 up bike rack
This bike rack is awesome. Make from solid aluminum, a bit expensive but is worth the money. At the time of writing this article, it was not for sale on Amazon. You can, therefore, get it on 1up USA site.
It is a good buy and will never get rusty because of the aluminum construction.
