The geef’s XS Lapierre e-MTB needed a rack, but this bike has no fitting eyelets at the axle, just a pair near the seat tube. Odd. There are spindly conventional racks on eBay from 12 quid with crude pipe clamps for the seat stays. Then a mate put me on to Kiwi-made Aeroe racks which are unbraced but also suit full-sus bikes like his Levo. I found a set discounted for 90 quid.

It all looks very nicely made and simple to fit; the supplied 5mm hex key is all you need. The Spider uses a U-shaped and angled 21mm ø anodised alloy bar with 2.5mm sidewalls which fits into sturdy nylon seat stay clamps with widely spaced rubber feet held down by nylon straps. That’s it. You add a pivotable top tray to take a rack bag, to hang panniers, or attach side plates to strap on dry bags.
You’d think to handle ~15 kilos of baggage on rough trails without triangulation the required heft to eliminate flex or fractures would add up. But the bar, clamps and straps (above) come to 1165g. Not so bad for a fits-all solution. And of course a Spider will work with a full-suspension bike.

Out of the box, first issue I found was the top of the U-bar sat a good 5 inches above the 27.5″ tyre facing forward, as shown on the box. On this bike that would perch the panniers up in the clouds. I know from motorbiking that rear loads want to be as low and forward as possible (more below). A machine handles direction changes so much better like this.
On pedal bikes forward positioning is of course limited by rotating heel strikes, but low definitely makes a bike respond more predictably off road, and produces less leverage on the whole system. And as it was, along with being very high, faced forward interfered with the dropper on this XS frame.

Or so I thought. A few weeks later after borrowing the rack on my Merida for a bikerafting overnighter, I refitted the Aeroe right back down on the stays and it cleared the saddle just with room for pannier heels.

To get it like that I’d sawed 2 inches off each leg, then another 2 while still making the rack fittable on other bikes. Result: much better (below right). The bar could be two inches higher and still be fully in the clamps.

Next issue: the Over Volt’s seat stays are squared off, not round, so the Spider’s curved rubber feet (below) would not sit so well once clamped down. I’m probably over-thinking this bit, but I taped the stays and crammed in some bits of hard plastic tubing to help fill the gap.

After that it was time to tighten down the rack as explained in the Aeroe video, below.

The clamp tensioning arrangement is quite clever, once you get used to the idea of the woven nylon straps attached to metal brackets. As explained in the vid, the U-bar may need to flex out a bit to sit on both stays, but once tensioned down it all sat solidly. Next, tighten the bar into the clamps and fit the top tray. You’re done.