Hard to say since the diagrams and photos aren't showing a lot of fit detail. Strikes me as being designed for modern-tech gravel bikes with disc brakes, thru-axles and fat fork blades, so there may be issues trying to use it on a 40yr-old road frame with rim brakes, qr skewers and skinnier fork blades. Dimensionally it looks maybe OK.
But it's hard to tell how far back the top/rear edge/corner of the rack sits, I'd be concerned about that corner in relation to the down tube. Can you swing the fork 90-deg in either direction without that corner hitting the downtube? I don't think that rearward reach is adjustable, if you want to keep the rack level.
The upper mount uses a hose clamp, hopefully it can clamp down small enough to fit a smaller-diameter road fork, but you'd want to check that. Is the clamp somehow integral with the mounting piece, or can you use any hose clamp that fits your fork blade well? Keep in mind hose clamps have sharp edges and such, I'd want to give a good tape wrap or similar to protect my hand skin when attaching/removing bags/gear.
It's also unclear to me if there's room behind the rack, at the crown, for your brake, and how hard is it going to be to adjust/tinker with the brake with the rack installed.
And maybe getting access to your front qr skewer is going to be tricky. That's kind of always the case with low-mount racks, but that v-shaped base leaves less room for your hand/palm.
I'm kind surprised there's so little detail shown for a $150 rack. The line drawing with the dimensions doesn't even show the upper rack mounts. Maybe I'm expecting too much....
Just a quick note on your stability thoughts above. I don't have a lot of touring or heavy load-carrying experience, but every bike I rode with a rear rack, heavy rear panniers and stuff loaded on top of the rack handled _very_ differently than when the bike was unloaded. Lots of compensation and body english needed when trying to stand and pedal, definite feeling the weight wag a little side-to side then as well, front end wanting to jump up wheelie-style on steep seated climbs if I sat too upright. I was always conscious of all that weight back there., I could always feel it on the bike. None of that was horrible or caused me to crash or made me hate my tour/life. But the contrast from that to the LowRiders on my TSV was unbelievable. The TSV, with 20lbs in low-mounted bags around the fork, handled almost identically to my unloaded road bikes. The load mostly disappeared. I only noticed/felt the weight at really slow speeds and tight turns, trying to do a u-turn at zero mph, maybe took a little more effort to keep the bars straight on slow climbs? But keep in mind these are 40yr-old memories for me. At least I didn't have to worry about inadvertent wheelies.
My TSV memories dovetail with what folks seem to say about low-trail front-loaders, but when I tried them they didn't work for me. That was with a standard front rack and large bar/porteur bags, which is what you usually see. What's exciting me a little bit about getting my TS-IV built, being that I've still got my original LowRider rack to fit it with, is to see if my 40yr-old memories match today's reality, when I'm 40yrs older, 40lbs heavier on a good day, and easily 40% less fit.
Originally Posted by
Het Volk