Interbike 2013: Küat NV and Trio Racks
For 2014, Kuat has released the Trio roof rack, added a new black color to their lineup, and expanded their options to tie down Fat Bikes.
Küat NV
Their upscale NV bike rack remains unchanged for this year other than a new Stealth Black color scheme with chrome highlights. The new color combination looks really nice in person, and adds some variety to their generic gray paint design. The Kuat NV rack is a sweet bike rack that is well built, sturdy, moderately lightweight, easy to use and full of innovative and functional features, and has the ability to carry 20 to 29-inch wheels. One of the NV’s highlights is the integrated Trail Doc bike stand, although it’s somewhat rudimentary, it works for quick trail maintenance. It comes as a two bike rack for $549, but you can buy an optional 2 two bike extension for $389.
Küat Trio
They recently released the Küat Trio roof rack system ($209), which carries one bike (up to 45 lbs) on its sleek NV like tray, and comes with three adapters for 9, 15, and 20mm forks, an integrated bike lock and a security attachment for the roof bars. For 15mm and 20mm forks, you just swap out the appropriate inner adapter, and then use your forks own axle clamp for attachment. The 9mm set up uses their skewer, and it interlocks with the default 15mm adapter to keep things from rotating out of position. The 15mm and 20mm adapters can be swapped out by loosening a bolt that resides in the front of the tray. It will also come in the new Stealth black color scheme instead of default gray.
The large lever arm on their skewer for the 9mm setup takes some queues from the NV series, and it works really nicely to clamp a fork down. They also have an optional 9mm and 15mm x 135mm Fat Bike skewer if required. In addition to a Fat Bike skewer for the Trio, they have Fat Bike extensions for the rear-wheel strap for the Trio, NV, NV Core, and Sherpa racks.
I have been testing both the 4-bike NV and new Trio, and I’m very impressed with them so far. They have been refining and tweaking things to help remove some older buggy issues.
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