Last year, Travis published a napkin sketch of an overengineered seatpost rack in our Wish List series. It was a spiritual melding of a saddle-mounted bag and an axle-mounted rack. The idea was to offer better suspension action, better dropper post action, and better usability. A couple of months ago, thanks to expert fabrication by Riley Ogden of Souvenir Cycles, that napkin sketch is now a reality.

I have this weird compulsion to “optimize” things in my life. Unfortunately, they’re rarely the things I’m supposed to be optimizing. Like my diet or my spending habits or my work/life balance. But lemme tell ya, if I come up with a better way to shelve my storage bins, it’s all I can think about until it’s done. It’s just so satisfying when a system works, especially when it’s a system I came up with myself.

I’ve been on a similar mission with my bikepacking setup. The homemade frame bags on my gravel-touring bike are scalable and tailored to my lifestyle. And the front rack on my mountain-touring bike is bolted to a linkage-fork, allowing the weight to be sprung instead of unsprung. I’m particularly proud of that one. Adding sprung weight arguably enhances suspension performance instead of impeding it.

To be clear, this is in no way a criticism of axle-mounted carriers on suspension bikes. Old Man Mountain makes a rack that allows you to load up to 70 goddamn pounds on the front or rear axle of pretty much any bike. And you won’t even have to adjust your suspension after loading or unloading. That’s like a superpower, and you can buy it right off the shelf. I recently ran dual OMM Elkhorn racks (25-pound capacity) on a four-day Lake Tahoe singletrack tour, and the experience left me deeply changed.

Before that trip, I only ever wanted to do road and gravel touring. I thought singletrack touring was just endless type-two fun, without enough type-one fun to justify all the forced-dismounting and bike-pushing. Now, I’m suddenly thinking about biting off some of the AZT next winter. But that optimization-compulsion won’t leave me alone.

And so, I’ve been on a mission to create a frame-mounted rear rack. Sure, I could just use a saddle bag, but they slightly limit dropper-post travel, and severely limit dropper-post speed. I hinted at the idea in one of my Wish List installments. I’ve always wondered why nobody had made a more robust, thoughtfully designed seatpost rack. Sorta like the ones popularized by Topeak, just much stronger and sleeker. More “optimized,” if you will. And in that Wish List, I also hinted that I had a solution in the works. I now have that solution. And it works.

I met Riley Ogden when he started volunteering with Lowelifes Respectable Citizens Club, a trail-care organization I work with in the Angeles National Forest. The remote trails we specialize in tend to attract riders and hikers who are more interested in adventure than adrenaline. But chatting with Ogden, I quickly learned that he seeks both in equal measure. And for the most part, he seeks it on a hardtail. A hardtail that, I later learned, he made himself.

From our 2024 MADE Bike Show Reportage…

Ogden is the designer, builder, and founder at Souvenir Cycles just up the street from my home in LA. Aside from its clean lines, tight rear triangle, and shred-ready intentions, the Souvenir hardtail boasts a design feature I fell in love with when I first saw it done on a DeKerf frame in the mid-90s.

It’s the four-piece seatstay junction where the stays proudly extend a couple centimeters past the yoke. It’s not only cool and unique, it elegantly calls attention to the frame’s hand-made-ness. Like the coarse brushstrokes on a Monet or the rough marble base of a Rodin.

Those seatstays made it abundantly clear that Ogden had the vision and the skill to make my cargo-carrying dream a reality. The dream consists of a tubular construction rack that would clamp around the top few inches of a full-suspension frame’s seat tube, replacing the seatpost clamp.

The chassis would have to extend the load far enough up to clear the rear tire when bottomed-out, and far enough back to clear a 200 mm dropper post when slammed. That leaves a narrow space for a structure that’s carrying heavy weights at high speeds over challenging terrain. So, I envisioned a skeletal design with a flat platform buttressed by narrow rails that would sit just wide of the tire before curving in to meet the bottom of the seat-tube clamp.

My design would have to be tied to one very specific combination of frame size, seat-tube angle, suspension travel, and wheel diameter. I had no intention of making something universal. I’ve grown quite fond of the Giant Trance 29 I purchased after reviewing it, so I designed around that bike’s parameters. I could have maybe conceived an adjustable design that would fit multiple bikes, which would probably be more marketable. But it wouldn’t be optimal.

I wanted something slim, light, and clean. So, I made a mock-up out of clothes hangers and duct tape. It wasn’t clean, but it sure seemed like it would work.  I dropped off a rough drawing at Ogden’s shop, along with my bike so he could confirm clearance during construction. Then, a few weeks later, some process photos started trickling in.

There was some back-and-forth on the nitty-gritty, and a significant early-stage redesign. In fact, there was a fair bit of back-and-forth and redesigns. On that note, this is probably a good time to mention this was a one-off project for Ogden. Don’t expect to see a custom seatpost rack drop-down menu on the Souvenir Cycles website anytime soon.

It only worked out because Ogden and I know each other, and I live close to his workshop. Plus, although I paid quite a bit for this rack, I get the feeling he undercharged me. This sort of work would be hard to repeat perfectly and would be impossible to repeat at a large scale. So, apologies in advance if I’m getting your hopes up. ‘Cause this thing is sick.

Even the first steps were pure art. A double pinch bolt slid over the top of the seat tube, while a faceplate secured below the top-tube junction. The clamp’s length would provide plenty of spread between the rack’s top and bottom stays. And it created just enough room for a pleasing round cutout that bordered the top-tube weld. Ogden achieved that cutout by starting with a rough cut, and finishing on the round end of his belt sander, which had the perfect radius.

That’s the sort of improvised solution he has to come up with on a regular basis. Alongside building frames and taking on odd jobs like mine, Ogden works for a prominent LA artist, helping fabricate some pretty complex structures.  His workshop features various presses, rollers, a decades-old French milling machine, and a high-tech frame jig with all the fixins. But as Ogden tells it, the most important tools used in making my rack might have been his eyeballs. As in, he just kinda had to eyeball it.

With the clamp done, the rest of the rack would be made of 3/8″ 4130 chromoly tubing that would have to be bent, mitered, and welded essentially freehand. Although he’s got a tubing bender and a big heavy flat table, any other “fixtures” had to be designed off-the-cuff. But you wouldn’t know it. The thing is dead-straight, board-stiff, and most impressively, it clears my saddle and suspension at bottom-out with room to spare.

The platform is sized to fit the eight-liter dry bag where I keep a tent, sleeping pad, ground sheet, stakes, and my three pillows. And I’ve started strapping my tent poles off to the side for a sort of overlanding vibe. That whole package is about six and a half pounds, not counting the rack itself. That doesn’t sound like much, but the goal here is to shred like I would my unloaded bike. It’s less than I might carry on a normal rack, because this is not a normal rack.

When cantilevered way out from the frame, the weight gets multiplied pretty heavily during an impact. But I’ve done a number of overnighters that have included a couple thousand feet of pretty rowdy descending. I’ve made an effort to subject the rack to a dense mix of intentionally and unintentionally harsh landings, but it’s still silent and true. That’s really impressive given its weight.

For reference, the all-aluminum Topeak seatpost rack claims to weigh 722 grams. But Ogden’s all-steel rack weighs 648 grams. Plus, I have not noticed my dropper post extending any slower when I have the rack loaded than when it’s unloaded. I worried at first that the bending force from the rack might add friction, like overtightening a seatpost clamp. Time will tell if I’m shortening the life of my dropper bushings, but no issues so far.

The only slightly unsettling sensation comes when I get behind the saddle for a very steep descent. In that scenario, my bag sits a few inches higher than it would on a rack like the OMM Elkhorn. Instead, it’s about the height of a saddlebag, but it can’t squish out of the way like a saddlebag. I have to remind myself not to go for every near-vert rock roll I see. But if anything, the fact that I feel like I could go for them is a testament to how well the bike rides with this setup.

Plus, I’ve since found other uses for it. This has become my go-to trailwork bike, so the rack has also carried tools, gasoline, and beer … though I keep it mellow when I’m carrying gasoline and beer. On that note, this process has shown me why my idea—brilliant as it is—might have a hard time ever catching on.

A high-tech seatpost rack solves a problem that not many riders face. The bikepacking, rack-carrying, suspension-craving, trail-working, crowd is a relatively small one. And they’ve already got plenty of good options. But I know this is the right solution for me. Not just because of how well it works and how good it looks. But because I’m already thinking of how I can further optimize it.