Review - Minoura Mag Riser

So I bought one of these dinky wheel things for the front wheel of the bike when it's on the trainer. I have a star shaped one but it's packed somewhere and I never use anything but the lowest height channel anyway so I figured something like this would be fine.

I was wrong.

The good thing - it's small.

The bad things...

First, the front wheel channel is not really deep so the front wheel can move around. If I wanted a setup where the wheel would turn whenever I leaned on the bar weird I'd just use a couple books. I bought the wheel riser so the wheel would stay pointing forward. The Minoura Mag Riser fails in this respect.

Second, the riser is made of relatively soft plastic. Since it's really small compared to the other star type risers, it's hard to center under the front wheel, especially if I'm hopping the bike around to point it at the TV a bit better or maybe the fan. The thing ended up getting crushed under my front tire. Not only that, it hasn't popped back into place, so the crushed part is like the bruise of a bruised apple - looks pretty normal but you push on it and it just sinks.

I took pictures because I didn't want to write 3000 more words, and the three pictures count towards that. I figure maybe it counts for 2500 words since the last picture is out of focus.

Looks pretty normal, but note the slight crease on the right side of the picture.

The crease is more visible here. Since the plastic is already, err, "seamed" (it's already folded in that crease area), it takes very little effort to push it down.

This is more obvious. A poorly executed idea. If they used a much harder plastic, it would have been fine - or a number of other design improvements. Well it would have been strong. The front wheel would still move around though because the channel is wide enough for a cyclocross tire.

I'd recommend that you NOT purchase this item. I'll have a review of one that works in a bit.