It’s no secret that I’m a cycling nut. That last word has a lot of different dimesnions to it. One of those dimensions is an attraction to odd, and sometimes downright weird bicycles.
I’ve had my flirtation with recumbents. I own a tandem. I’ve ridden off-road tandems. (That’s a “two-up” mountain bike!) I’ve ridden, and will someday own, a reproduction high wheeler. Regular readers will know that I do touring, from credit card to full loaded, and that I have a small collection of singlespeed and fixed gear bicycles. I once had a serious cargo bike, and commuted on it, and hauled ridiculous loads with it. I’ve experimented with various utility trailers, and have even supported century rides from the bike, while hauling the trailer.
That last hits on this topic. I also am committed to using a bicycle instead of an automobile, wherever possible. I don’t like the idea of a bike as a toy, that has to be loaded on a car to be hauled to someplace to be used.
A few years back, I got the idea that I’d like to be able to take my mountain bike to the trailhead, without using a car.
Now mountain bikes don’t do well on the road. Riding to the trail is great, if the trail is fairly close by. But if it’s any real distance away, going there on the off-road bike is likely to leave one too tired and beat up to have any fun on the trail.
A road bike is such a worthy beast, on the road. So I had the inspiration. I would try to rig up a means of carrying my mountain bike to the trail, with my roadbike.
My first idea was to attempt to copy the idea of an automotive towbar. I could just hook the second bike up to the first and tow it along. This idea might just be workable, but the assembly I came up with certainly wasn’t. Hours of planning, and then more hours of fab work in my shop, produced an odd hardware set. It took me over an hour to install the thing the first time I tried it. I didn’t make it out of the driveway on the test ride.
Oh well. Back to the drawing board. Then I had the idea of using the trailer. The immediate problem was that the mountain bike wouldn’t fit on the trailer. I started looking at fabricating a mount to accomplish that end. It didn’t take me too long to realize that the load was going to be too topheavy, and unstable to be workable. But I’d had another minor epiphany as I worked.
I fabricated a fork mount for the little one-wheel trailer. This would accept the fork of the mountain bike. It was child’s play to arrange a wheel holder that would go along side the fork mount.
Try to visualize this. First there is a roadbike, a good, sturdy, light tourist of a bike. Connected behind the roadbike is a single wheel trailer, with its own pivot to allow it to follow the bike. Mounted to the trailer is the front of the mountain bike, and it has a pivot of its own, the fork steerer bearings. So this assemblage has four wheels on the ground, two on the towing bike, on the trailer, and one on the towed bike. It is well over ten feet long. It took me a while to figure out how to hook all this up by myself, without dropping anything. I had to find, and then follow a definite order of assembly.
Now consider the weights. The light tourist was, by no means a light bike, weighing in at 27 pounds. The trailer was a svelte 22 pounds. The mountain bike, a relative lightweight of a full suspension job, tipped the scales at just under 30 pounds. So the whole rig, along with necessary water, tools, and spares, totaled out to near 100 pounds.
That first ride was a bit of a revelation. To say I was wobbly at the start would be an understatement. Things moved, shifted, and wriggled around, until I got up some headway. And then I had to make the turn at the end of the driveway! I made it. Barely. And it took the whole road to do it. That maiden voyage was confined to the immediate neighborhood. I wasn’t committing to the road until I had some feel for this assemblage.
Did I say “feel”? I’ve captained a tandem, with very heavy and inexperienced stokers. That was nothing compared to this. The rig was ungainly, and difficult to steer. I had to anticipate stops and turns. Basically, I had to phone ahead for reservations. After an hour of test rides around the neighborhood, followed by tweaking things, left me feeling fairly confident that I could pull the trick off.
The following day, I took it out on the road. This was to be a serious “proof of concept” ride. I did have enough sense to pick a low traffic time of day, and to stick to lightly traveled roads. For the first five miles or so, things went pretty well. Then I hit a hill. Not a little hill, but a real one. I was, instantly, in my lowest gear, out of the saddle, cadence way down, and growling with effort. As the speed fell off, so did any semblance of stability. Worse, I was rocking the lead bike in my efforts to keep things moving. I found I needed a half a lane to keep from running off the side of the road. But I made it to the top.
“Okay. I can do this,” I said to myself as I topped the hill, and sat down, greateful for the chance to recover and steady. But then things started to happen.
As the speed built up, the long rid steadied down. But the speed built up fast! All that weight, my 180 pounds, aboard a 100 pound train, got us moving down hill in a hurry! Hey, this wasn’t so bad! Wind in the face, and all that!
At 20 miles per hour, things were good. At exactly 21.5 mph, the rig started to oscillate. We are talking a speed wobble on steroids! I was suddenly, all over the road, and applying the brakes made things worse!
I made it to the bottom of the hill, but I have no idea how. I was a passenger for the last quarter mile of that descent. And now I was on the wrong side of the hill. I had to go back over it to get home!
Through experimentation, I found that I could control the thing. The wobble was predictable. It always set in at 21.5 mph. Holding speed below that meant using brakes. Lots of brakes. I wore a set of pads out in a week of experimenting. (A set of pads usually lasts me more than a year.)
Eventually, I dismantled the long rig. It was too ungainly, too unsafe, and way too much effort. I’m still convinced that this concept has merit, but not like that.
That we can do a thing, does not mean we should do it.
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