It's Christmas day, 30 degrees, and partly sunny in Akron, Ohio. Good day if a bit chilly for the annual Christmas bike ride.
Friday, October 19, A Trailer Project. Wow - it's been a while. Sorry about that, folks. Not that this comes close to explaining the long gap in posts, but I recently picked up a bike-related project that readers might find reasonably interesting: converting a Burley trailer into a flatbed cargo hauler. When my kids were small, I had a pretty nice Burley trailer that we got a lot of enjoyment from. When the kids outgrew it, I sold it to clear some space in my garage. Some time later, I found myself regretting that decision.
Even though I wasn't using it for the kids any longer, it occurred to me that I could have used it for other purposes, like carrying groceries, etc. I like to run errands by bicycle whenever possible, including grocery shopping - but I'd find that there were limits to how much I could carry on the bike conveniently and easily. I often take big water jugs to our market to refill with filtered drinking water - and those really just can't be carried easily on a bike.
A trailer would be great for that kind of thing. To that end, I had been searching around for another trailer that I could hopefully get for minimum investment. I suppose it didn't necessarily have to be a Burley, but I've found that they are built well and last a good, long time, and I generally like the hitch design which is quite secure but also easy to attach to almost any bike as long as it doesn't have disc brakes.
The problem at least for bargain hunters is that they also hold their value better than most other trailer brands. Checking garage and estate sales turned up lots of cheap knockoffs from big department stores like Target and Walmart that I wasn't particularly interested in.
