Topeak rack - rear light bracket is annoying My wife has a Topeak Explorer rack.It has an bracket on the rear for a light or reflector. It is useless to mount any of the rear lights we own and is ugly. Anyone find any use for it or cut it off? I really like the rack and bag mounting system but loathe that weird metal bracket. Topeak appears to sell a light for it, but not a very good one IMHO. Thanks for any answers.
Sure you can cut it off after all you bought it.
Personally, I would keep it as you never know down the road if you want to mount something on there and it is not all that ugly.
For example what if you want to buy a rear facing bike rader (e.g. Garmin Varia) that has really poor factory mounting hardware. For me it took almost a week of periodically thinking how can I mount this thing to my road bike without risking it falling off and keeping my underseat bag where I have my flat kit. Finally I came up with a solution that involved a 3rd party bracket and the light strap on my underseat bag. I certainly would not have expected to use that strap on my bag in that manner when I bought it almost 2 years ago. So if I was just to say well let me cut it off, I would probably be buying a new bag in order to run my current setup.
Until you find a better use for the area, you could always try to use the area to add more visibility with things like a reflective sticker or even reflective circles that screw into the holes already cut in it.
Hope that helps.