Belated thanks everyone for your thoughts and advice, I've finally gotten my touring fork, IRD Lhasa Front rack, and Carradice bags up and running on my bike. Here's how it looks:



I will probably want to change my front wheel to something sturdier still. As you can see the geometry is quite compact and it is not a proper touring bike, but it is the best I have and will hopefully work for a few trips in the future. As of now I use it every day for commuting, and it worked just fine for hauling a load of groceries (of course this was the first thing I did after mounting the bags )

A couple of notes:

* I can't say enough about changing from carbon fork to steel. The ride is so smooth now and it just eats up any bumps in the road

* The IRD Lhasa Front Rack is great, it mounts sturdily to the fork, though I had to drill extra holes in it so that I still had room for my front brake. It has an appealing matte finish and is just solid all around, yet still relatively lightweight aluminum

* The touring fork also required getting creative. This particular 1" threadless touring fork from SJS cycles was the only one that I could find. When it arrived, I could not get my existing crown race to fit on it. Turns out, it was too small to fit, the fork required a 26.4 rather than 27mm crown race. Maybe I've got that backward, in any case I had to pay a bike shop $35 to shave down the area where the crown race sits