Shuttlerack

Adopted Trail: 2Cents | Vedder Mountain, Chilliwack

Shuttlerack is a 100% Canadian vertical hitch bike rack: designed, fabricated and finished in Chilliwack/Abbotsford. We’re actually a company by accident. In the summer of 2020, I needed a better rack for our family’s mountain bike fleet, and if any of you have used those arm-style racks, you’ll know how miserable they are.  Well, everything was sold out.  Since I teach architectural design at UFV, I computer modelled a prototype for a friend to weld up.  We collaborated on its construction.  The final design looked great.  Word got out, demand grew, so we formed a company.

We designed the rack so that only the tires touch the rack; most racks touch the frame or fork and you end up with scratches or other damage to the bikes.  Our tagline is “the no-scratch bike rack”, and given how much people spend on bikes, preventing damage while transporting them to the trailhead just makes sense.  The rack is crazy easy to load and unload, and it reclines so kids and shorter riders can roll their bikes up to the rack and load ’em up.  Every time I put my bike in the rack it makes me so HAPPY!  So if your rack is making you sad, we’ve got a rack for that!  Our racks carry 2-6 bikes, and can carry 24″-29″ wheels, fat bikes, and gravel/road bikes.  We have a modified wheel cradle for 16-20″ wheels (BMX or kids’ bikes). We totally had not designed the rack with this in mind, but the rack carries skis and snowboards, so you can just leave it on your vehicle all year round!

Our family has had FVMBA membership for years, but the other family we run the company with rediscovered mountain biking as a byproduct of starting the business, so that’s very cool.  Adopting a trail seemed like a great way to contribute back to our local network, and since 2 Cents is often our warm-up run, getting to sponsor that trail was fantastic!  Corporate sponsorships are brilliant because businesses can make some really significant contributions to FVMBA – both financially and in company trail days, where the employees can do some real work on the trails!