Trailing

[perlmonger]

The bike trailer that ramtops found and ordered for me on eBay (from this retailer) arrived this afternoon from Germany. A small w00t! at least is in order; I've been wanting such a device for quite some time, and it means that pretty much all of our shopping from now can be done without firing up the car. The thing even has a waterproof cover so, within reason, weather can be disregarded.

It weighs 7½kg, and you hardly know it's there when pulling it (empty at least; the load limit is 40kg :) though it's a bit of a pig getting through bollard chicanes. I took it for a test run along the village cycle path and up Glebe Road, which is enough of a hill to judge how much work the thing is going to be in practice: I dropped a gear (middle 2nd AOT middle 3rd) getting to the junction at the top, but it really isn't nearly a gear's worth of extra effort.

It's really well thought out: it folds flat when it's not in use and is remarkably simple to set up and collapse. You pull it along with an articulated tow bar that mates with bracket that sits neatly inboard of the back wheel quick release, held on with a pin and circlip (and emergency strap). My only minor quibbles (apart, of course, from the beast being utterly insecure: order of shopping is going to have to be taken into account) are that the knobs holding the crossmember in place are irritatingly overendowed with thread and there's no strap or other mechanism to hold the folded trailer closed, or its detached wheels to the rest of the machine. Oh, and there's nothing to hold cargo in place, but a suitably sized bungy spider will fix that.

Turns out, of course, that we don't actually need anything bulky from the shops this weekend, but its time will come soon enough…

Recommended.