I can appreciate the simplicity and ruggedness of your design. It's also simplified for manufacturing, no moving parts. Cool on that and more. I guess my point is I still use my car for other tasks besides going to the trail head or the slope. My bike is not always on the back. Sometimes I might not ride for a week (due to work) and having the permanent wing sticking out 'at all times' in the back would make me nervous about clipping it eventually. Also, I wonder how much wind drag it would cause on a small car like mine during daily use, without a bike? I also have need easy access to my trunk, meaning that I need to get close up to it,so I can drop stuff in (like groceries). The folding rack I have allows me to get right up to the trunk from the side and load it. I like your design, I like how easy it is to load a bike and take the bike off - I just wish I could move it out of the way when I'm not using it. Anyway, congratulations on thinking outside the box. It looks bullet proof.

This is a cool idea, but can I suggest something? Being an owner of a small car, not an SUV or a truck, it appears that this thing will be a little too wide. Even the short one might be a little too wide for a small to mid size car. I think a cool development of your product would be to allow the tray to fold up on a beefy hinge for when it's not in use. Sort of like the Sport rack EZ2 does it. That rack (although butt ugly) works well for cars and uses a wheel tray system like yours. The difference is, it folds up and can also pivot down for hatchbacks. Cool product though, just not for my little car.

I did this with my DHX-air but instead I just used a glob of cheap bearing grease and packed it into the same area that the spacer goes (in this tutorial). It's works well because you can just scoop out or add more grease to fine tune the spring curve. Bearing grease will stay thick under reasonble heat so it won't move once the shock warms up.

I want to buy Matt Hunters teeth. The dude has great teeth.