I purchased this as a second carrier before going on holiday with some friends - I'd already bought a Thule Velo Vise for my own bike, and borrowed an old roof carrier, but needed a cheapish rack which would take a Cannondale with its fat tubes.

At first glance this is a fairly normal-looking roof carrier. Two wheel mountings and a pivoting bar which clamps to the bike's downtube. However, in the details it's not quite normal.

The most obvious unusual point is the pivot in the middle of the rack, allowing it to fit to curved roofs. In practice it means that if you have a flat roof it's virtually impossible to get the rack straight - not that it really matters. The good thing is that it folds in half so it's easier to store.

Fitting the rack to the roof bars is easy enough: place it at an angle, twist the front section on, then secure to the rear bar. Sounds like a good system? Nope. I haven't worked out how you fit more than two to the roof - you need so much space available to turn the thing. Like everything on the rack, they've ignored conventional wisdom and it hasn't really worked.

The wheel mounts are pretty good - better than on my Thule. Solid metal levers and webbed nylon straps. Good stuff.

The downtube bracket is fairly solid, and will take big or small tubes with the rubber shims provided. Unfortunately even with the supplied sticky pads they tend to fall out quite easily. The bracket could do with opening wider. It rotates so you can set the clamp up at any point on the downtube, but if you have a frame-mounted pump it'll have to come off, and if you have a bottle cage on the downtube life's going to be very awkward. If you have two bottle cages life is very awkward indeed - good luck.

The bracket clamp is a clasp-style affair, locked down with a lockable lever. Annoyingly though, the only way to undo the clamp is by pulling the plastic cap which covers the lock
. This is a fairly flimsy bit of plastic and isn't up to the job. What was wrong with putting a finger lever in the clasp itself? And the lock is virtually impossible to use if you have a bottle cage in the way.

Actually getting the bike into the rack is a bit of a three-handed affair, especially if you have a heavy bike, or you have bottle cages, or you have more than one bike on the roof. Add the three together and it's chaos - make sure you have a handy friend.

Overall build quality is ok - the rack feels fairly sturdy, but the blank plastic cover over the front section is loosely clipped on and just crying to fall off at the wrong moment.

In short, it wasn't bad value (I got it when it was reduced) but it's really annoying to use. Once everything's in place it's fairly sturdy, but I wouldn't have it as my main rack. If you're a casual user and you need to carry a fat-tubed bike, it's worth a look. If you ride every week, you'll get frustrated.