Hi and thanks for reading my blog. In this article I'm going to try to explain;
- what GearHooks®are
- why I developed them
- why the bike storage hooks are so good
- what a wall mounted bike rack is
- what other sort of gear you can store with GearHooks®
GearHooks® were born out of a need to store mountain bikes. Like many people who own bikes and have a family, we had 4 or 5 bikes we used most weeks and about the same number of old bikes we wanted to keep. After filling the garage, shed and spare rooms with bikes and other sports gear and not being able to find, or get to, half of it I decided to do something about it (with some help from a few cycling buddies. I'm the chap 3rd from the right with legs like milk bottles).
Having bought many different types of bike storage hooks and brackets to try to solve the problem, I found that many were good but expensive, or cheap and flimsy or fiddly to fit.
Even worse, some were nearly impossible to hang a bike on. The wheel was hard to get onto the hook, the hook closed or moved around while you were trying to hang the bike up.
My son’s downhill bike and my wife’s electric bike were so heavy you could barely even lift them onto a hook. In the end I was cross and sweaty and had hurt my back.
Every time we got another bike, or a new bike with wider or narrower handlebars or different size wheels I had to start changing or moving the hooks around. That took ages drilling new holes and filling the old ones and it needed doing again every couple of years.
As a qualified Mechanical Engineer with over 40 years experience of designing and manufacturing products for many industries, and working with friends who are keen road and mountain bikers, we decided to have a go at designing something better.
It took us two years and lots of prototypes to come up with what I believe are the best engineered, most adaptable and most reasonably priced bike storage hooks and wall mounting bike racks that are designed and manufactured in the UK and sold and supported throughout Europe. We are so confident they are good we offer a lifetime warranty - you break it - we fix it.
We produced single wall mounting bike hooks to keep cost down, that could fit directly to the wall with just one hole to make fitting easier.
After that we made a double bike hook that could store 2 bikes on a single bike hook
Double bike hook - GearHooks B2
as well as a special double hook with a bike mounting hook and a biking gear hook to store a backpack, coat and helmet as well.
All the GearHooks® mount with just one fixing so fitting is really quick and easy.
We designed the GearHooks® so that, with different fittings, they would mount onto a rail.
This meant that we could produce wall mounting vertical bike storage racks with hooks for up to 5 bikes each but that only needed 3 holes to fit them to the wall.
The GearRails™ also makes changing things around, or storing more bikes, a piece of cake. The rail also meant we could get all the other stuff like helmets, back packs, shoes, tools, spares and so on, stored in between bikes.
That creates space, saves time looking for stuff and gets us out doing more cycling. Hence our tagline - Make Space. Save Time. Do More.
All the bike storage hooks and bike storage racks have been designed to take any type of bike like a road, mountain, downhill electric, BMX, recumbent or even a tandem, any size of bike from an XL adult bike to a kids bike, with 20” to 29” wheels and any size tyre up to 3”.
The individual GearHooks® will hold up to 25Kg so you can mount them high on the wall, as long as you can lift the bikes, so this works best with road bikes or lighter bikes.
If you have electric bikes or downhill bikes it's far better not to have to lift them onto a hook because you'll probably hurt your back. All the GearHooks allow you to mount any bike without lifting.
It soon became obvious that skiers, golfers, fishermen, gardeners and other people had similar problems so I decided to design GearHooks® for them. Like the bike hooks, each hook needed to be deigned to hold each piece of equipment.
One of the most popular is the golf bag storage rack that can mount up to 5 golf bags or golf trolleys on the wall.
We also make a ski storage rack and a wall mounting snowboard rack that looks great in a house, garage, shed or ski chalet. They will store up to 12 pairs of skis or 6 snowboards or a mix of both.
If you’re into gardening we have a garden tool rack and garden implements storage rack that will store up to 30 tools in just 1M of wall space.
For music lovers we have a 1M long guitar storage rail with 3 guitar hooks that will allow you to store up to 9 guitars in some pretty impressive ways.
Lots of people do many different sports and the GearRail™ system means that you can mount lots of different gear on the same rail, like a bike, a pair of skis and a golf bag.
All the products are manufactured in the UK. Some on CNC machines and some by hand. They are all designed and manufactured with great precision, care and attention to detail so that they do the job better than anything else on the market. That's why we offer a satisfaction guarantee (Love it or Return it. We'll even collect it.) and a lifetime warranty (if you break it - we fix it).
Now we have a range of over 50 different hooks and rails that you can mix and match for just about anything you can think of. If we haven’t thought of it we could even make it for you.
All the products are listed on GearHooks.com. I hope you will find something you like and can set it up in a way that works for you. Please contact me at GearHooks if you need some help or advice.
Thanks for reading about GearHooks.
Luis Prtak
GearHooks® Founder