The Almost Bicycle Trailer – Ron Snell

The thing about lifelong learning is that sometimes you don’t really know what you’re going to learn. I mean… there’s no syllabus, right?

Many months ago, Nora and I decided to bicycle across Missouri on the Katy Trail, a beautiful 237-mile Rails-to-Trails route that sort of follows the Missouri River.

When I say “beautiful,” you undoubtedly think scenery, and you’d be right. But that’s not all: what’s equally beautiful is that freight trains typically don’t climb more than a 2% uphill grade, so it’s all fairly flat. Old legs like flat.

In spite of the fact that our plan included ready-made lodging and definitely did not include camping gear, I was pretty sure we would need a bike trailer for our stuff because our panniers looked rather skimpy given our previous baggage on trips. I’m not going to say we overdo it, but I will say that having Southwest Airlines end its “two free bags up to 50 pounds each” policy was a blow.

Of course I could have just shopped for a trailer. There are many fine ones available. But I had a better idea. I would design and build my own because I am, after all, a lifelong learner and I would undoubtedly learn something in the process. Sadly, I did.

The box was pretty easy. I ordered a handy-dandy duffel bag with enough pockets for a pharmacy’s worth of bottles, took its measurements, and built the box to go around it. There’s more to it than that, but a box is a box and I’m crafty enough to make a lightweight box.

For the tongue, I shunned the traditional straight tongue that fastens to the rear axle of the bike. My better idea was a lightweight, S-shaped, aluminum tongue that snaked up to my rear bike rack. The S-shape would provide some shock absorbing magic that so many others had never thought of, and I could so easily imagine a great hitch.

I was a little concerned about the flexibility of the tongue because of its give and take, but I remembered that freight trains have a little give in the couplings so when the train is starting out it doesn’t have to get all the cars rolling at once. I won’t explain the physics of that because you can Google it. Suffice it to say that my tiny trailer was designed after titanic trains, which should have given me pause, but didn’t.

My hitch was genius. It allowed the trailer to yaw, pitch and roll like a little airplane without affecting the bike. Perfect, I thought when it was done, but I was increasingly concerned about that S-shaped hitch. Out of an abundance of caution I abandoned the S and turned it into a Z. In hindsight a Z is pretty much just a harsher version of an S, but at the time I considered it a radical improvement.

Time for the test ride. We drove to a bike trail and launched, although that makes it sound more successful than it was. It turned out my little masterpiece had a mind of its own when I headed off, and it took full advantage of its flexible tongue to decide where it wanted to go, and when.

The effect was rather like having a large dog on a leash tied to my rack. It wandered back and forth, bounced joyfully up and down, and took advantage of the flexibility to lag behind and then suddenly decide to catch up. It was, in a word, awful. And that was before it started to fall apart because the nut who designed it didn’t use lock nuts.

Still, lifelong learning is about learning, so as far as I’m concerned, it was a resounding success for the low, low price of under a hundred bucks, or about the same as registration for the 6-week Fall Term with Lifeling Learners GTX.

I actually learned two things, 1) a flexible tongue is perfect for learning languages but not bike trailers, and 2) Nora and I can fit everything we really need for the week into our panniers. Necessity is the mother of compaction. This alone could change our lives.

The bike trailer will sit comfortably on a shelf in my garage because it’s designed to hold all of its parts inside its box, which is one thing I actually got right. It looks great sitting there. Someday I will make a tongue that’s pretty much like everyone else’s.

Lesson learned. Although I still believe if I just tweak the Z a bit….