When I lived in NYC I spent many hours day dreaming about a way I could transport my wife on my bike. We would often meet in different places around the city, me on my bike and her delivered by public transit. I always thought it would have been cool to transport her home on my bike somehow. I faced three main challenges in my quest.
1. I lived in fourth floor walk up
2. The solution would have to easily be incorporated into my bike for use on any given day.
3. I possess very little in terms of the skills/tools needed to put a sophisticated hack together.
The closest out of the box solution I ran into was this cool idea - the CC Rider.
Of course it would have been hard to incorporate this exact solution into my daily rides and I don't understand Japanese. Reader Dave had a similar desire and sent along his bike jumble hack. Take it away Dave . . .
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I was at a bike jumble, which is a new thing for our city. This guy was trying to get rid of a old rusty 'Bratz' branded girl's bike, almost begging people to take it away. It had a purple faux-velvet chopper-style seat. I was haggling for some comparatively normal pedals with the guy and I said I would give him the asking price if I could have the seat. He agreed, but insisted I take the whole frame, and for some reason I agreed. He suggested I mount it on my wall as a piece of modern art. I rode the three miles home with the whole thing (sans wheels, they were missing) over my shoulder.
After my arms had recovered, I set about bodging it onto my mountain bike. The seat post is considerably smaller than my seat tube, a problem I solved, after looking at commercially available adapters, by cutting the whole seat tube out of the old frame and fitting inside my seat tube, with an old inner tube over it to take up the slack. The other bits of frame still attached make a handy stop.
I made the mounts for the rear supports from some box iron from some old table legs. Originally I made some wooden inserts to spread the load over more of the seat stays, but eventually decided they were unnecessary. I still plan to improve the mounts to make it easier to swap seats, but they're strong enough.
My mother's an upholsterer by trade and as it happens had some purple vinyl leftover from doing up a VW camper, and so I added some extra padding and recovered it in this to make it waterproof.
The original idea was to enable me to carry my girlfriend on the back before she got a bike, which it did admirably. I also added some coach bolts to the handy holes near the dropouts to make footrests. Unfortunately, my girlfriend doesn't like going on the back of it, though I've had other more trusting passengers. I keep it on most of the time though and use it daily. The riding position's funny, but for short journeys (which most of mine are) the extra padding makes up for it, and it makes you feel like a kid again.
Those footrests? Now attachment points for my bike trailer. I'd send you more details of this, but there are so many bike trailer designs, the internet doesn't need anymore.
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