T Rex backrest

[furious_blue_imp]

Well, I am a structural engineer, and I have to say kudos to furious blue for noting the obvious deficiency in this backrest. From what I can see, the attachment bolts for both the backrest and the luggage rack are placed in pure bending from inertial loads of the passenger body and from the mass of luggage. In both cases, putting the bolts in a bending load are both inefficient and prone to failure. As a minimum, the stiffness of the joint will be highly suspect, even if the bolts don't break. If they don't break immediately, I'd expect them to fatigue over time. That's just my humble opinion.

Good to hear from someone that knows what they're doing :-).
All I have is a few decades over which I've had 2 welded steel luggage carriers fail, one of the failures happened on a long trip when I was about 2000 miles away from home.
From those experiences, seeing geometry like that of the rack in question immediately make me wince.. Pavlov's Dog kind of wince...