Fiamma Bike Rack Installation

I decided to buy the Fiamma Carry-Bike Pro C bike rack after agonizing about which bike rack to buy for a long while.  It sits up kind of high but it does not block the license plate or the break lights.  It holds two bikes high enough so they should not get too dirty from road dust.  The other racks I considered were hitch mounted and I think would have had all of these problems.

This is the bike rack that comes as a factory option on the Fuse.  I purchased it from Fiammausa.com.   The price was $352 + tax and shipping.   I had it within a week of ordering.  It might have been cheaper ordering from Europe, but I really did not want to use my credit card outside the US.   I was also quoted $568 from several Winnebago dealers with a 90 day lead time.

It was delivered to my front door by the nice UPS man nicely packed in a large box.   Most of the rack was pre-assembled.   The first thing I did was to look over the instructions.  Fiamma could do better in this area.  It was mostly pictograms and several of the pictures were not exactly what I had purchased.   Not too bad, but I had to skip to the back several times to figure out where I was at.

To put it together I needed a metric socket set and a drill.   Remember, this is from Italy, metric if in doubt.   I also needed a Torx bit, a small standard screwdriver and an adjustable wrench.   A ruler helped for figuring out which bolts were which, but was not required.  It took me and my son 2 hours to construct.  If I was more mechanically inclined it could have been done in an under an hour.

My Fuse did not come with bike rack option but did come with the mounting hardware already installed.  This made installation really easy.

It went together fairly easy.   You first construct the frame that connects to the motorhome.  It is held to the mounting hardware by 4 stainless steel rods.  Two on the top and two on the bottom.   The top part of the rack slips over the rods.  The rods go through the bottom legs of the rack to positively connect to the motorhome.   In the picture above you can see the rod that holds the lower left support.   The rods on the bottom slide out through the side and then slide back through the legs.

Once we had the frame on the mounts we needed to use the drill.  This was the only scary portion of the exercise. The top and the bottom supports slip together so there was some adjustability.  Now that the height was determined you had to drill a hole through each leg to add rigidity to the rack.  So a hole was drilled on each leg near the red band and a bolt inserted to tie the top and bottom half together.

The next step was pretty easy - attaching the bottom.  Fiamma ships this pre-assembled so all we had to do was to use two bolts to connect the bottom folding portion to the supports.  After that, we were pretty much finished.  We had to snap on the holders that keep the rack up when folded and then add the bike supports to the top of the rack.  Then we were done.

Then it was time for some testing.  Did we build it well enough to hold a bike?  Well we tried it out and it worked!   We still have to see how well it works on a trip, what is the best way to secure the bikes and several other details but that will be the topic of another post.  

I am going to depend on some videos from http://thefitrv.com and I will let everyone know how it works for me.  If you have any tips, yell out.