Previously, I went over the task of moving my bike fleet’s storage outside of our living room, and I came across the Feedback Sports Velo Hinge as a possible solution. Today we’ll be looking at it in greater detail.
By default, the Velo Hinge opens its hook and front wheel plate to the left. Shorn from its cardboard backing, the instructions for mounting and reorienting the hinge direction are revealed.
For my particular installation, I wanted it to swing open to the right. Doing this is a matter of grabbing a 5 mm hex key and unthreading the hinge bolt, making sure none of the plastic spacers are lost.
Once the hinge bolt is removed, just pull out the hook from its retention plate, move it to the top edge, and re-insert.
Reassemble the hinge bolt and tighten to the desired tightness.
Once you deploy the hook and close up the hinge, you should get this.
Also included in the Velo Hinge hardware are a rear wheel bumper and five wood screws.
The rear wheel bumper is basically a glorified drawer pull handle. Its main function is to serve as an anchor point for the rear wheel to lean against when the suspended bike is pivoted, and prevent uncontrolled swinging.
The Velo Hinge is meant to be mounted on a wall stud (i.e. a vertical wooden beam). For mounting on a concrete wall, plastic screw anchors are needed. These are readily available from any hardware store, and are sunk into holes that are drilled into the concrete.
After drilling and mounting, here’s the result.
Looks neat, but how is it in action?
Here’s Hyro suspended on the wall in the standard perpendicular orientation.
As the Velo Hinge is mounted very close to the corner, its pivoting action becomes very useful. Here it is leaned over as far as Hyro’s 400-mm-wide handlebars will allow. Note how the rear wheel bumper helps keep the bike in place, and that I had to reposition the cranks so that they don’t interfere with the pivoting.
So far, this solution has worked really well. The Velo Hinge is very sturdy, with smooth action from the plastic spacers and adjustable tension on the hinge via the bolt. With solid hardware and non-gimmicky operation, longevity shouldn’t really be an issue, and I feel PhP1,100 is a very fair price to pay for it.
From the above photo, this short section of wall has enough space for another Velo Hinge to store yet another bike. Unfortunately, the alcove roof sheltering Hyro from the rain is too short to protect another bike from rain water. I will have to figure out some other place to hang Bino.
the accidental randonneur 