The UltraSwing® is bad news for bike racks.

In this photo: A pre-RambleRack home-fab solution we had made of an older bike rack welded to a straight hitch tube.

As many of our amazing UltraSwing owners know, the UltraSwing was created out of a love for getting off-road and camping along with our love of bikes, and never wanting to leave them behind on trips.

Over the past 5 years we've never stopped improving the experience of the UltraSwing. From accessories like the camp table and SideHack, to components like the UltraLatch, we've always been true to the mission of creating the best possible experience.

In this video: A brief overview of the RambleRack project.

From the earliest days of the UltraSwing, we saw that the bike rack was the next weak link in the system. Bike racks have never been designed specifically for Trucks and SUV's, let alone the off-road environments an UltraSwing owner is experiencing. Add to this the growing popularity of E-bikes and you've got a recipe for some sketchy bike rack encounters.

Now let's talk about the elephant in the room. The UltraSwing makes those existing bike rack experiences worse. Why? Short answer: Physics. The UltraSwing extends the bike rack further away from vehicle, thus amplifying the movement of the bike rack and bikes.

Some bike racks may have skirted the line of "adequate" mounted straight to the hitch of the vehicle. This especially true for light bikes and mild off-road. But even without getting into the weeds on how these racks fail in general for a modern use case on a truck or SUV, let's just keep it to how they work with a swing-out.

In this video: Visuals of the UltraSwing and RambleRack moving as a system.

A swing-out creates a diving board. There isn't a swing-out in existence that's immune to this. You could create a very similar scenario just putting a solid hitch extension that matched the length of a swing-out. It's just physics.

But don't just take our word for it. Other bike rack manufacturers have said that their "off-road" rating is void after the addition of a swing-out hitch.

So why are we telling you all this? Because after 5 years of mulling over this problem, we created the RambleRack™. 

To make a bike rack work well with the UltraSwing required us to double down on the burliness of the rack's construction and security of the bikes beyond anything that existed prior. In other words, we had to create the safest bike rack on the planet that was unapologetically overbuilt to handle these extra forces. Learn more about this process here.

In this video: A flashback to RambleRack testing in Barstow.

The initial response to the RambleRack has been a fair amount of "My X-Brand rack works fine", but this often from non-UltraSwing owners. We've also had examples of people who had good experiences with their bike rack until purchasing an UltraSwing, and then shortly after swapping out their rack for a RambleRack.

We'd love to hear from you. How has your bike rack performed with the UltraSwing? What bike rack are you currently using? What bikes are you carrying? What questions do you have about the RambleRack?

Learn more about the RambleRack here.