Not sure why I didn't go that same way. Maybe I didn't want to scratch my plate. There may also have been constraints w/the bikes I was loading when I first began using the cardboard. It was when I was loading up three hardtail mountain bikes at a time. That was like putting together a three-dimensional puzzle. We had to carefully rotate each pedal to align with "whitespace" on the adjacent bikes. I remember having to put gorilla tape on down tubes and on fork stanchions, taking care to keep our pinned pedals from scraping those items, shoving cardboard in all sorts of places to prevent damage, having to thread pedals between spokes of adjacent bikes, having to put Gorilla Tape over the pedal pins, and sometimes we'd miss something and end up with damage anyway. Then the whole mass of bikes would of course bounce up and down on that rear rack for an hour each way. Life is so much easier now that I'm usually just putting one bike on instead of three.